The Innocent Libertine - Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

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The Innocent Libertine

by
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	The Innocent Libertine
Author:	Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Genre:	Novel
Written:	(1909) (Eng. 2025)
Length:	224 pages
Original in:	French
Availability:	The Innocent Libertine - US
	The Innocent Libertine - UK
	The Innocent Libertine - Canada
	L'ingénue libertine - Canada
	L'ingénue libertine - France
	Geträumte Sünden - Deutschland
	L'ingenua libertina - Italia
	La ingenua libertina - España

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

French title: L'ingénue libertine
This work combines two earlier novellas by Colette, Minne (1904) and Le mariage de Minne (1905); the latter was then re-titled Les égarements de Minne
Translated and with an Introduction by Graham Anderson
Previously translated by R.C.B., as The Gentle Libertine (1931) and by Antonia White, as The Innocent Libertine (1968)

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Our Assessment:

B : charmingly frank

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The NY Times Book Rev.*	.	25/1/1931	.
The N.American Rev.*	.	4/1931	Herschel Brickell
Sunday Times*	.	15/9/1968	.
Time*	.	26/1/1931	.

(* review of a previous translation)

From the Reviews:

"(T)he most mature, the most delicate and the wittiest book yet written by Colette (.....) Notwithstanding its lightness, The Gentle Libertine is actually a penetrating story of love, in adolescence and maturity. (...) No reader, certainly no Anglo-Saxon reader, would be likely to call The Gentle Libertine a great book, or an important one. (...) But in her chosen field, the analysis of the highly personal human emotions, few writers have been more subtle or more penetrating." - The New York Times Book Review

"(A) frank book relieved of all possibility of offense by the delicacy with which it is handled. It is worldly-wise Colette at her most subtle, and that class of readers known as "sophisticated" will enjoy it." - Herschel Brickell, The North American Review

"All prize stuff, lucidly translated, full pf prying detail." - Sunday Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       First published in 1909, The Innocent Libertine is basically a one-volume version of two earlier novel(la)s by Colette, Minne (1904) and Les égarements de Minne (1905), originally published under her husband's name (simply: 'Willy'). The Prefaces to The Innocent Libertine by Colette and Willy discuss some of what went into: "This melding into a single volume", with Colette assuming full responsibility for the text (and noting that her reworkings included: "the suppression of that share of the original collaboration contributed by" her (by then former) husband). Translator Graham Anderson notes in his Introduction that: "Some passages of the original Minnes are removed", but The Innocent Libertine is not an extensively re-written version but rather simply a slightly edited one of the two earlier works -- not least in its abrupt leap from the one to the next.
       The novel opens with Minne not yet fifteen years old, pretending to do her homework but in fact reading a sensational newspaper report headlined: 'Paris by Night', about an incident where: "two rival gangs met and literally massacred each other", leaving five dead. The fight was apparently over a woman -- or rather, a: "creature of barely sixteen" -- and Minne, living a sheltered life, closely watched over by her widowed (but still young, at thirty-three) mother, is easily carried away by the romantic drama of it all.
       Minne daydreams of adult adventure and passion without much conception of what it might involve; she lusts without understanding what she feels. She becomes fixated on one of the chiefs of one of the gangs, Curly -- convincing herself then that a man she passes on the street daily, whom she calls the prowler, is in fact Curly -- and:

Minne's heart is all a-flutter, she no longer sleeps, she gets up at night to look for the shadowy figure of Curly beneath her window ... !

She fantasizes that they could: "go away together ... into the life he leads ... into a life where I shan't even remember any more that I am Minne ...". At home, of course, she remains very much the schoolgirl Minne, with the one boy in her proximity her "brotherly cousin", Antoine, who is infatuated with her but has none of the dark recklessness she craves. She toys with him, teases him -- and even gets a reaction out of him, physically goading him until:

Loose strands of hair brush Antoine's chin, provoke a maddening itch which rushes through his whole body like a leaping flame ... to assuage it, still holding her wrists, he spreads her arms even wider, presses his body to hers and rubs himself against her in the manner of a young dog, ignorant and excited ...

       Minne yet again pushes him away, even as she herself is confused by what has been aroused in her -- wondering what might have been, could have been, if it had been another, not Antoine, whom she can't take entirely seriously .....
       One night then, Minne is convinced she sees the prowler from her window, that he has come from her -- and she rushes out into the night, desperately looking for him. She is determined, but enters a world foreign to her; unsurprisingly, she is laughed at in the streets -- "'It's a kid,' says the other. 'She looks a proper joke'" --, and comes to recognize: "There are too many things I seem ignorant of ...". She wants to convince the women in the streets -- or herself ... -- "I'm one of your own .... or I'm going to be", but it's not meant to be, certainly not yet.
       Eventually, she stumbles home, and though nothing, in fact, came of her adventure, with her: "blonde hair, all grey with dried mud" she is now dirtied -- and, as for Antoine:

He is crying for Minne, he is crying for himself as well, since she is lost, debased, marked forever with the stamp of degradation.

So ends the first part of the novel, the story of a girl looking to grow up faster than she can handle it. Abruptly, then, the novel leaps ahead several years, where we find Minne, somewhat surprisingly, married to Antoine.
Minne still seeks passion -- and she's taken to taking lovers in order to find it. But it isn't going well:

'There, it's done .... another one ! The third, and no success. I ought to give up.

Apparently, sex hasn't lived up to expectations. Now that she's had it, she wonders what the fuss is about -- shouldn't there be more to it ? But, apparently, neither her husband nor her lovers have been able to give her the pleasure she's been expecting. She sums up her latest go at it:

' I mean, just look ! That lad, he's as nice as can be ! He almost faints with pleasure in my arms, and meanwhile there I am, waiting, saying: "Obviously, this isn't unpleasant ... but show me something better !"

Basically, the second half of The Innocent Libertine is the story of Minne in search of an orgasm. In this it is surprisingly modern -- and frank, as, indeed, Minne herself is frank, complaining:

I have slept with him and three other men, counting Antoine. And not one of them, not one, do you hear me, has given me the tinies taste of the rapture, whatever it was, that left them wrung out and half dead at my side. Not one of them has loved me enough to read the disappointment in my eyes, my hunger and thirst for the very thing I had given them !

She knows she's missing something -- and she's desperate to achieve it:

'My God,' Minne sighs, 'why is nothing ever perfect ? You wait, you wait, it's like a powerful desire to weep surging through your body, and ... nothing happens ... !

But sleeping around has only gotten her so far -- certainly, no closer to coming .....
Antoine, meanwhile, remains devoted:

Antoine is one of these incorrigible types. Every time he sees Minne he declares 'I love you !' nd it is true. It is an absolute truth, with no nuances, for ever.

       Yet even he can't help become suspicious; he even hires a private investigator to follow Minne and learn what she's up to (unfortunately enlisting the services of a firm that doesn't seem to employ investigators that are much good at their jobs). But until someone can make Minne "a woman like other women" she will remain restless, seeking .....
       Antoine suggests a make-or-break get-away to Monte-Carlo, and Minne is up for it -- and, yes, her luck changes, first at the tables and then in bed, as the book does indeed build to its releasing climax, leaving a satisfied Minne with her: "body rippling and shuddering ...".
       Of course, it's all a bit (and parts are very) silly, but Minne -- and Colette's -- forthrightness are quite winning. Of course, the teen Minne is a silly duck, and the adult -- if not exactly mature -- one could certainly explain herself better to her husband (who, after all, seems always eager to please, in every respect, so surely also in that one if he knew it were an issue), but there's an appealing nonjudgmental sincerity to how the character and story are presented. It's all a bit crude -- not so much in the physical descriptions as in the story itself, and especially the lazy lack of a proper transition from the first to the second part of the story -- but in Colette's presentations still has its charms.
       In one of the Prefaces Colette writes of the original Les égarements de Minne that it is one: "which I could never consider a good novel". The version here apparently -- so Colette -- has been: "abridged, relieved of some of its burden" -- and, while she still apparently has her doubts about it in this form, this now-second-half of The Innocent Libertine isn't bad at all.
       In both parts, Minne is impetuous and shows little restraint -- and admirably little shame, a welcome corrective to the expectations of female behavior too often had and found in both real life and literature. For all its faults, Colette carries off her intentions appealingly and well in The Innocent Libertine, making for a fine (if rather odd, and surprisingly explicit) little entertainment.

- M.A.Orthofer, 29 April 2025

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Links:

The Innocent Libertine:

Dedalus publicity page
Le Livre de Poche publicity page
Feltrinelli publicity page

Reviews (*: review of a previous translation):

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette:

Colette at books and writers

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of French literature
See Index of Erotic, Pornographic, and Sex-related books
See Index of Books Written Between 1900 and 1945

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About the Author:

French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette lived 1873 to 1954.

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