Colet, Louise (1810–1876)

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Colet, Louise (1810–1876)

French journalist and poet who was Flaubert's lover and the model for his Madame Bovary. Born Louise Revoil at Aix, France, on September 15, 1810; died on March 8, 1876; daughter of a Provençal family named Revoil; educated at home; married Hippolyte Colet (1808–1851, a musician), on December 5, 1834; children: (with Victor Cousin) Henriette Cousin .

Selected works:

Lui: roman contemporain (Lui: A View of Him, 1859).

Louise Colet was born in 1810 at Aix, France, of a middle-class Provençal family; she was the daughter of a wine merchant. Considered an outstanding beauty, she married the music composer and violinist, Hippolyte Colet, who was a professor of harmony and counterpoint at the Paris Conservatoire. The couple arrived in Paris in 1835. There, Colet concentrated on her poetry. Her volume of verse, Fleurs du Midi, appeared in 1836, followed by another Penserosa in 1839. She also wrote La Jeunesse de Goethe (1839), a one-act comedy; Les Funerailles de Napoléon (1840), a poem; and the novels La Jeunesse de Mirabeau (1841) and Les Coeurs brisés (1843). In 1837, she received a government pension. Two years later, she won the Academie Française poetry prize. Only the fifth woman winner since the prize's establishment in 1671, she drew national attention, including that of Academician Victor Cousin, later the minister of public instruction in France. Though her works would be endowed five or six times by the Institute, it is thought that she owed this distinction to the influence of Cousin rather than to the quality of her work. The criticism of her books and the prizes conferred on her by the Academy exasperated Colet, and in 1841 Paris was diverted by her counterattack on Alphonse Karr for his reviews in Les Guêpes (she stabbed him). In 1840, she had to defend an action brought against her by Madame Récamier 's heirs, after Colet published correspondence between Benjamin Constant and Récamier in her columns in the Presse.

A prolific writer of prose and verse, Colet is known more for her intimate connections with some of her famous contemporaries—Abel Villemain, Gustave Flaubert, and Victor Cousin—than for her own writing. Cousin and Colet became lovers, and she gave birth to a daughter, Henriette, whom Cousin publicly acknowledged as his and supported. In 1846, she met and began a liaison with Flaubert, 12 years her junior, which lasted for two years. Flaubert was an influential editor of her writing and later modeled his best-known fictional character, Madame Bovary, after her. When Colet became pregnant from a relationship with another man, both the affair with Flaubert and her marriage ended. The infant died shortly after birth. After her separation, Colet's government pension did not sustain her comfortably and fell far short when her husband Hippolyte returned to her, riddled with consumption (tuberculosis). She supported him until his death in April 1851.

Colet and Flaubert resumed their stormy relationship in 1851. Desperate to marry Flaubert but harshly rebuffed, the hot-tempered Colet became resentful and published scathing novelized accounts of her lover while continuing to pursue him: Une Histoire de soldat (A Soldier's Story, 1856) and La Servante (The Maidservant, 1854). An affair with Alfred de Musset did not distract her from Flaubert, but did provide new material for a successful publication in 1859. Lui: roman contemporain (Lui: A View of Him) was in part a fictionalized account of the Musset-George Sand affair, and in part a fictionalized account of Colet's life. Francine du Plessix Gray describes Colet as a "19th-century Erica Jong who recklessly splashed her life and loves across her poetry and prose."

Because of her tarnished reputation, as well as ill health, Colet moved to Italy in 1859, where she worked as a journalist and correspondent. She returned to France at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War and had some success giving lectures to sold-out audiences: she was an ardent supporter of the Paris Commune of 1871 and a fervent critic of the Catholic Church. In later years, says Gray, she became "a militant born-again moralist." Colet, who suffered from chronic respiratory difficulties, contracted anthrax and bronchitis. She died March 8, 1876, at the age of 65.