The Flower of Youth

By the late 1940s Colette's companion and editor, Maurice Goudeket, was assembling her late prose into rare, well-made volumes meant to be collected. The Flower of Youth is one of these, and it wears its mixture openly: chronicles sit beside tales, prefaces beside occasional and even promotional writing, brought together into a single book from work Colette had once kept in separate drawers.

The gathering is not accidental or careless. It belongs to a deliberate final stage — the making of citable, collectible 'Colette' out of a lifetime's scattered short prose. Read that way, the book's very unevenness is informative: it shows how a great writer's late miscellany gets shaped, late, into something bookish and lasting.

The Flower of Youth stands with Stroke by Stroke and Intermittent Journal as one of the late Le Fleuron volumes. In English, some of its material is reachable through The Collected Stories of Colette, which carries a section under the title 'In the Flower of Age.'

There is no plot, and no single theme. The book gathers eight pieces of deliberately mixed kinds — chronicles, tales, prefaces, and even publicity texts — that Colette had previously kept separate, bound together into one late volume.

That mixture is part of the book's meaning. It belongs to the late effort, guided by Colette's editor Maurice Goudeket, to turn her scattered short prose into finished, collectible volumes. Some of the material is reachable in English through The Collected Stories of Colette, in a section titled 'In the Flower of Age.'