The Vagabond

Colette wrote The Vagabond out of the six years she spent earning her living in Paris music halls after leaving her first husband. Renée Néré is not Colette in any literal sense, but the trade is exact: the dressing rooms, the touring, the tired bodies, the mixture of degradation and freedom in performing for money. The novel took the material Colette knew from the inside and turned it into a first-person study of a woman deciding what she will and will not give up.

The book is written as Renée's own account, and its real subject is less the romance than the argument she conducts with herself. Maxime is decent and the offer is genuine; the question is whether love is worth surrendering an independence bought at a high price. Colette lets Renée state the case for security honestly, and then lets her refuse it.

The Vagabond has a sequel, The Shackle (L'Entrave, 1913), which follows Renée into the aftermath of that decision. Colette later adapted the novel for the stage, and it was filmed more than once, first in 1917 with her friend Musidora.

Renée Néré performs mime and dance at a Paris music hall, partnered on stage with Brague, a seasoned professional who treats the work as a trade. She is thirty-three and divorced from Adolphe Taillandy, a successful painter whose serial infidelities and lies wore the marriage away; she now lives alone and keeps herself on the uncertain income of the stage. She used to write novels and has stopped; she calls herself a literary woman who has gone to the bad, and says plainly that she no longer allows herself the luxury of writing. The life is tiring and insecure, and she guards it because it is hers.

A wealthy admirer, Maxime Dufferein-Chautel, begins to court her seriously. He is kind, persistent, and offers what her first marriage counterfeited: love, money, an end to the grind. Renée is drawn to him and frightened of him in equal measure, because she can see that accepting means dissolving back into a man's life and losing the hard, plain autonomy she has assembled. She leaves on a long provincial tour with Brague, partly to decide at a distance.