Sisters of Salome -- Excerpt 4
“From her [Charlotte Kinceler] I got my first notions of tolerance and concealment and the possibility of coming to terms with the enemy. Concentration, humility -- it was an instructive time.” Befriending Charlotte, who sold among her herbs and teas, erotic toys, Colette began to take charge of her own sexual life by learning from those declassé women who made sex their profession. Present at the arrival of one of Willy’s lovers in her home, she watched, perversely fascinated, as the passionate woman lay langorously across the bed, untying her bodice, while describing exactly how she liked to make love. Colette embraced her jealousy and called Willy’s mistresses “my ‘monsters.’” She also learned complicity, on one occasion entertaining one of her husband’s mistresses while he entertained another.
Heterosexual sex was, for young Colette, a curious melange of bittersweet disconnection. “It would seem that for him,” she wrote, “...sexual pleasure is made up of desire, perversity, lively curiosity and deliberate licentiousness...whereas it shatters me and plunges me into a mysterious despair that I seek and also fear.” This despair took the form of a lover and the lesbian tendencies of young Colette found their object of desire. In May 1901 she began an affair with a rich, beautiful and married American woman. Georgie Raoul-Duval mesmerized Colette who followed her about Paris from dress shops to her boudoir like a lovesick puppy, a prisoner of her passion. Willy, his voyeurism piqued, encouraged the liaison with perverse logic: “Certain women need women in order to preserve their taste for men.” He insinuated himself even further into the affair by finding a love nest on the Avenue Kléber where the two women could meet undisturbed -- but he kept a key.
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