The Kepi

By 1943 Colette was seventy and writing in a diminished, occupied Paris. The four stories collected here had appeared in the magazine Candide in 1941–42; their gathering into a book was held up by wartime shortages and censorship. What unites them is a subject Colette had made her own — love that comes too late, too unequally, or at the wrong angle — and a habit of looking backward, so that the stories keep opening onto the circles and figures of her earlier life.

The title story turns on a late and unequal romance, and on the small, exposing gesture that ends it. But readers have often preferred 'La Cire verte,' a piece the novelist Amélie Nothomb later described as the moment she understood what prose could be. That split — the title story admired, a quieter piece loved — is characteristic of the book, which rewards the reader who does not stop at the first tale.

The Kepi belongs with Colette's late short fiction, alongside Bella-Vista: composed, reticent, and interested in the ways desire embarrasses and outlasts people. In English the title story and 'Armande' travel through The Collected Stories of Colette.

The book collects four stories rather than telling one. They are 'La Cire verte,' 'Armande,' 'Le Tendron,' and 'Le Képi,' each a self-contained tale of love thwarted, mistimed, or unequal. Several of them look back to the literary and theatrical Paris of Colette's youth, so the stories carry a retrospective shadow along with their immediate drama.

The title story concerns a late romance between an older woman and a younger man, and the small, revealing gesture that undoes it. Around it, the other pieces work variations on frustrated feeling, with the composure of Colette's late manner. The pleasure of the collection is its range within a narrow key — and readers have long argued over whether the title story or the quieter 'La Cire verte' is the finer piece.