Three… Six… Nine…

The organizing idea is simple and unusual: Colette walks back through the dwellings of her life and lets each one hold its stretch of years. The rue Jacob belongs to her first marriage; later come the rue de Villejust, the Ternes, the chalet at Passy, the boulevard Suchet, the entresol of the Palais-Royal, the Claridge hotel, the rue de Marignan, and finally the return to an upper floor of the Palais-Royal. The result is an autobiography by address, in which habitation itself is the real subject.

Because the rooms carry the story, the people and events arrive obliquely, attached to a staircase, a courtyard, a view, a rent. It is a characteristic late-Colette move — to reach the life through the physical world rather than through confession — and it suits a writer who always trusted rooms, gardens, and objects to tell the truth about the people in them.

The book is short and was issued with illustrations by André Dignimont. It belongs with Colette's other late self-portraits, Vesper Star and The Blue Beacon, and shares their method of arriving at a life sidelong.

There is no continuous narrative. The book is organized as a walk back through the places Colette lived — a sequence of Paris apartments and hotel rooms rather than a chronological life. Each address stands for a period of her life: the rue Jacob for her first marriage, then the rue de Villejust, the Ternes, Passy, the boulevard Suchet, the Palais-Royal, the Claridge, the rue de Marignan, and the final return to the Palais-Royal.

People, marriages, separations, and changes of fortune enter the book attached to those rooms — a view, a staircase, a courtyard — rather than told head-on. The real protagonist is habitation itself: how a life leaves its record in the places that housed it. It is one of Colette's late self-portraits, written during the Occupation and first serialized in the newspaper.