Chéri and The End of Chéri

First published in 1920 and 1926 respectively, Colette’s Chéri and The End of Chéri form a subtle, unsparing portrait of love, beauty and the passage of time in early twentieth-century Paris. In the first novel, Fred Peloux, known as Chéri, is a beautiful, pampered young man involved with Léa de Lonval, a wealthy former courtesan nearly twenty-five years his senior; their intimate, playful world is unsettled when Chéri is expected to marry a younger woman. In the sequel, the consequences of their separation unfold against the changing social landscape of post-war France, as youth and age acquire new and painful meanings.

With her characteristic precision, sensuality and dry wit, Colette examines the unequal bargains of desire and the ways beauty can become both privilege and burden. Léa emerges as a particularly compelling creation: self-possessed and perceptive, she confronts the prospect of ageing with a dignity that refuses easy sentiment, while Chéri struggles to imagine a life beyond the comforts of youth. Read together, the novels offer a remarkably clear-eyed meditation on attachment, vanity, loss and the passing of an era, confirming Colette’s extraordinary ability to reveal emotional complexity through the smallest gestures and most intimate details.

From the book

“I was for you the most beautiful, the best of women, and you loved me?”

— Colette, Chéri

On Chéri and The End of Chéri

“Colette’s most marvelous and mature reckonings with age and youth.”

— Becca Rothfeld, Bookforum