The Pure and the Impure

Colette called this her most personal book and defended it as perhaps her finest, though it puzzled readers expecting a story. It has none. Instead it moves by portrait and reflection, circling the question of what pleasure is and what it costs, and refusing the easy moral the title seems to promise. 'Purity' and 'impurity' turn out to be unstable categories, and the book's intelligence lies in unsettling them.

Its materials are drawn from Colette's own wide acquaintance with the sensual undergrounds of her era: an opium evening, the salons and attachments of women who loved women, the anatomy of a Don Juan, the tenderness and cruelty inside desire. She writes about homosexuality — female and male — with a directness and sympathy rare for its moment, treating it as one of desire's many countries rather than a scandal.

The book reached print in stages. Gringoire began serializing it in December 1931 and stopped before the end, its editor unwilling to carry it further. Ferenczi published the complete text in 1932 as Ces plaisirs, a title Colette accepted rather than chose. In 1941 she revised the book and gave it the title she had wanted from the start, Le Pur et l'Impur. It is best read as a long, subtle essay in the voice of a novelist, Colette thinking aloud across a lifetime of watching how people love.

There is no plot. The book is a sequence of meditations and remembered scenes, loosely linked by Colette's inquiry into desire and its varieties. She recalls an evening in an opium den; portraits of women who loved women and the forms their attachments took; the psychology of a practiced seducer; the workings of jealousy, obsession, and tenderness. Each section is a study rather than a story, and the reflective narrator is Colette herself, drawing on a lifetime's observation.

Running through it is the question the title poses and never quite settles: what separates the 'pure' from the 'impure' in matters of pleasure, and whether the distinction holds at all. Colette treats sensuality — heterosexual and homosexual alike — as a landscape to be described honestly rather than judged, with a frankness and sympathy unusual for 1941. It is her most essayistic and, by her own account, her most personal book.