Chéri
The first half of the story — the liaison whose long shadow this novel follows to its end.
Read our take
The Last of Chéri
by Colette
Chéri comes home from the war to a changed Paris and an aged Léa, and cannot live in either — the harsh sequel to Chéri.
- 1926
About Colette
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeThe sequel to Chéri returns to Fred Peloux after the First World War. The beautiful young man is nearly thirty now, married to a capable wife who has found purpose running a hospital, and unable to attach himself to the postwar world. When he seeks out Léa, the woman he once loved, he finds her contentedly old and stout — the vanished Belle Époque made flesh — and the discovery finishes him. Published in 1926, The Last of Chéri is Colette's reckoning with what the war destroyed, told through one man who could not survive the peace. (The full plot, including the ending, is below.)
The story, in more detail
Where Chéri is a polished elegy for a prewar liaison, The Last of Chéri is its historical reckoning. Colette sets it in the flattened, altered Paris of 1919, and makes her spoiled hero the register on which the war's break with the old world is measured. Everything that gave Chéri his value — beauty, leisure, the whole ornamental economy of the Belle Époque — has become obsolete, and he has nothing else.
The novel is bleaker and more inward than its predecessor. Chéri drifts through a city getting on with reconstruction, estranged from a wife who has grown into competence and usefulness, and pulled backward into a past he can only reach through photographs and the talk of an old woman who knew Léa young. Colette treats his nostalgia not as sentiment but as a fatal condition.
The two novels are usually read and published together, and the sequel gives the first its full weight: what looked in Chéri like a love story turns out, in retrospect, to have been the last good season of a world about to end.
The full plot
Fred Peloux — Chéri — has come back from the First World War physically whole and inwardly emptied. He is married to Edmée, who has thrived: efficient, modern, absorbed in running a military hospital and in a life that no longer has much room for a decorative husband. Paris has changed around him, busy with money and reconstruction, and Chéri can find no place in it. The beauty and idleness that once made him valuable are worth nothing in the postwar world.
He goes looking for Léa. What he wants is the woman he mythologized — the Léa of the prewar bedroom — and what he finds is an old woman who has let herself grow stout, grey, and cheerfully content, a good companion at cards with no wish to be anything else. The living Léa cancels the remembered one, and Chéri cannot forgive her for aging out of his memory. He withdraws further, spending nearly every evening in the flat of an old woman from Léa's circle whose wall is papered with photographs of the demi-monde as it was, among them a large hand-tinted portrait of Léa young. That wall becomes the only thing he feels anything about.
How it ends — spoilers ahead
Chéri cannot live in the present, and the past he wants no longer exists outside old photographs. Cut off from his wife, from any occupation, and from the vanished world that gave his beauty a use, he ends up in the flat he has been visiting every evening for weeks, alone in it for the first time because its owner has gone to a funeral and left him the key, lying under the photographs of the young Léa. He shoots himself there with a small flat revolver. The novel treats the suicide as the logical end of a man made entirely of a world the war destroyed — nostalgia followed to the only place it can go. It is the darkest ending in the two-novel cycle, and the point toward which Chéri was always tending.
Why we recommend it
The other half of a masterpiece
Chéri and The Last of Chéri are one long work in two parts; the sequel is what makes the first novel tragic rather than merely poignant.
The war, measured on one wasted man
Colette registers the break of 1914–18 not through battle but through a beautiful idler who has no function once the old world ends.
Nostalgia written as a fatal condition
The novel treats longing for the past not as sentiment but as something that can quietly kill, and follows it to its conclusion without flinching.
What this book explores
The people in its pages
Fred Peloux (Chéri)
Back from the war and nearly thirty, beautiful and obsolete — a man made entirely of a world that no longer exists.
Léa de Lonval
Chéri's former lover, now old, stout, and cheerfully content — the living cancellation of the woman he remembers.
Edmée
Chéri's wife, who has grown into competence and purpose running a hospital — thriving in the peace that unmoors him.
Bring it to book club
- Léa has aged into contentment; Chéri cannot bear it. Whose response to time does the novel endorse, if either?
- Edmée thrives in the postwar world that destroys Chéri. What does Colette suggest made the difference?
- Is Chéri's nostalgia a personal failing, or the novel's diagnosis of an entire class the war left behind?
Timeline
1926
The Last of Chéri is published, after serialization in La Revue de Paris — the darker completion of the Chéri story.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- 1926
Paperback
- Paperback
- Roger Senhouse
Ebook
- Ebook
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
Break of Day
The other side of aging: Léa's contented old age is the acceptance Chéri cannot make, meditated on directly here.
Read our take
The Vagabond
The same demi-monde and its performers, before the war made their world obsolete.
Read our take
Gigi
The Belle Époque courtesan world at its brightest — the paradise whose loss kills Chéri.
Read our takeThe Last of Chéri: frequently asked questions
Who wrote The Last of Chéri?
The French novelist Colette. La Fin de Chéri was published in 1926.
Is The Last of Chéri a sequel?
Yes. It follows Chéri (1920) and continues the story of Fred Peloux after the First World War. The two novels are usually read and published together.
What is The Last of Chéri about?
Chéri returns from the war unable to attach himself to the changed postwar world. Seeking the woman he once loved, he finds her contentedly old, and the loss of his mythologized past destroys him.
Do I need to read Chéri first?
Yes. The sequel depends on the first novel for its characters and emotional weight, and gives Chéri its full tragic force in return.
How does The Last of Chéri end?
It ends with Chéri's suicide — the conclusion of a man who cannot live in the postwar present or recover the vanished world that gave his life meaning. The full plot is above.