I’ve always meant to read something by Colette, since she and I share the same birthday, and the other day my eye fell on one of her books while I was browsing at Jackson St. Books so I bought it.
But wouldn’t you know it… just when I decide to post something from it on my neglected blog… thers’s some trouble with the server and it’s down all weekend. I finally got it fixed this morning. So here’s an excerpt from the second page of “The Vagabond” first published in 1910, from the Enid McLeod translation published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1955. She declares her faith in luck or chance.
‘Chance, my master and my friend will, I feel sure, deign once again to send me the spirits of his unruly kingdom. All my trust is now in him – and in myself. But above all in him, for when I go under he always fishes me out, seizing and shaking me like a life-saving dog whose teeth tear my skin a little every time. So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days.
Faith, that is what it is, genuine faith, as blind as it sometimes pretends to be, with all the dissembling renunciations of faith, and that obstinacy which makes it continue to hope even at the moment of crying “I am utterly forsaken!” There is no doubt that, if ever my heart were to call my master Chance by another name, I should make an excellent Catholic.
August 24th, 2006
by Nannie
welcome back. Collette was looking at me from the bookcase above the computer, so I
started to read Vagabond. she’s moaning like me, “a woman alone”
September 13th, 2006
by Nannie
I just finished The Vagabond. It’s the first book I havefinished in a long time. I
relate to Renee. I think I could partner again, to use the word that Ken hates. He
says that it sounds like a business arrangement. He sounds like Max, as if he still
has the innocence that is only spent once, the innocence that Renee and I no longer have.
It may be true that I would bring the “maternity that childless women heap on their
husbands.” That may not be a bad thing. But Max was too innocent. Anyway, I enjoyed
Colette’s company. I am less alone and more lonely for reading it. soon, Nannie