The Other One

The setup is a familiar triangle — wife, husband, mistress under one roof — and Colette uses it to look past the man entirely. Farou is a charming, productive, self-absorbed playwright whose infidelities are a settled fact of his marriage. Fanny, his wife, is comfortable and unsuspicious until the affair with Jane, his indispensable secretary, becomes undeniable.

What follows is not a war between the women. The novel's real subject is the recognition that passes between Fanny and Jane: two people who know Farou better than he knows himself, and who value the household, the routine, and each other more than they value winning him. La Seconde — the second woman — names Jane's role, but the book is about how little that role finally divides them.

The Other One belongs to Colette's mature period, when she wrote about desire and marriage with a cool, unsentimental intelligence. Its refusal of melodrama, and its interest in what women owe and give each other inside an arrangement built around a man, make it feel strikingly modern.

Fanny is the settled, easygoing wife of Farou, a busy and successful playwright whose affairs she knows about in full — he writes to her from tour about the actress he is sleeping with, and she reads the letter aloud at lunch. Jane, poised and efficient, is his secretary and a fixture of the household, useful to Fanny and devoted to the family's smooth running. The three live together with Farou's adolescent son, Jean, in a comfortable domestic machine that Jane largely keeps oiled.

When Fanny can no longer avoid knowing that Jane is also Farou's lover, the novel withholds the expected explosion. Fanny's first fury gives way to a colder, more searching appraisal — of Farou, of Jane, and of what she actually wants to protect. Between the two women a strange candor opens up, in which each sees the other clearly and neither is quite the enemy the situation seems to require.