Barks and Purrs

Barks and Purrs
by Colette
Willy, aka Colette

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by Colette Willy, aka Colette Translated by Maire Kelly
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Title: Barks and Purrs
Author: Colette Willy, aka Colette Translated by Maire Kelly
Release Date: March 28, 2004 [EBook #11737]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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AND PURRS ***

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BARKS AND PURRS

BY
COLETTE WILLY

TRANSLATED BY
MAIRE KELLY

CONTENTS
PREFACE SENTIMENTALITIES ON THE TRAIN DINNER IS
LATE SHE IS ILL THE FIRST FIRE THE STORM A CALLER

PREFACE
Madame:
There are moments when one seems to come to life. One looks about
and distinguishes a creature whose foot-print closely resembles the ace
of spades. The thing says: bow-wow. It is a dog. One looks again. The
ace of spades is now an ace of clubs. The thing says: pffffffff--and it is a
cat.
This is the history of the visible world and in particular, that of my
god-children, Toby-Dog and Kiki-the-Demure. They are so natural--I
use the word in the sense in which it is applicable to the savages of
Oceania--that all their acts conspire to make of life, a very simple
proposition. These are animals in the fullest sense of the
word--animos--if I may employ the original orthography, capable of
exclaiming with those of Faust: "The fool knows it not! He knows not
the pot, He knows not the kettle."
* * * * *

And as such, Madame, you have placed them exactly where they should
be: their earthly Paradise is the apartment of Monsieur Willy. In your
salon, the probable palm and rubber-plant give the impression of
luxuriant Edenic flora, relatively speaking, and illustrate the
transmogrification which is to allow M. Gaston Deschamps--critic of a
"Temps" plus-que-passé--to announce to the wilderness (where he
speaks familiarly of Chateaubriand), and to the Collège de France,
how well he can admire and understand a true poet.
* * * * *
For you are a true poet and I will declare it freely, not concerning
myself more with the legends Parisians have the habit of weaving about
every celebrity. They admire Gauguin and Verlaine, not so much for
their originality, as for their eccentricities. And so it happens that
certain persons, unacquainted with the nameless sentiment, the order
and purity, the thousand interior virtues which guide you, persist in
saying that you wear your hair short and that Willy is bald.
Must I then--living at Orthez--tell Tout-Paris who you are, present you
to all who know you--I who have never seen you?
* * * * *
I will say then, that Madame Colette Willy never had short hair, that
she does not wear masculine attire; that her cat does not accompany
her when she goes to a concert, that her friend's dog does not drink
from a tumbler. It is inexact to say that Mme. Colette Willy works in a
squirrel's cage, or performs upon trapeze and flying rings, and can
reach with her toe the nape of her neck. Madame Colette Willy has
never ceased to be the plain woman par excellence, who rises at dawn
to give oats to the horse, maize to the chickens, cabbage to the rabbits,
groundsel to the canaries, snails to the ducks and bran-water to the
pigs. At eight o'clock, summer and winter, she prepares the café au lait
for her maid--and herself. Scarcely a day passes that she does not
meditate upon this admirable book:
A LADY'S COUNTRY-HOUSE

BY
MME. MILLET ROBINET.
Orchard, kitchen-garden, stable, poultry-yard, bee-hive and hot-house,
have no further mysteries for Madame Colette Willy. They say, she
refused to divulge her secret for the destruction of mole-crickets to "a
great statesman, who prayed her on his knees."
* * * * *
Madame Colette Willy is in no way different from the description I have
just given of her. I am aware that certain folk, having met her in society,
insist upon making her very complex. A little more, and they would
have ascribed to her the tastes of the mustiest symbolists--and one
knows how far from pleasing are those Muses' robes, how odious the
yellow bandeaux above faces expressionless as eggs. Robes and
bandeaux are to-day relegated to drawers in the Capitol at Toulouse,
from which they will never be taken more, except when occasion calls
for the howling of official alexandrines in honor of M. Gaston
Deschamps, Jaurès, or Vercingétorix.
Madame Colette Willy rises to-day on the world