'now in her early sixties, a plump, short, determined, witty lady with...fine gray eyes, moss-colored, curly, short hair and a tendency not to care much what she wears so long as it's comfortable, and includes a gay scarf...Called France's greatest woman writer since George Sand, Colette is also known as France's most famous literary cat-lover since Baudelaire. She has had dozens of cats--Persians, Siamese, alley--and once owned an ocelot, a present to her from the late Ambassador Philippe Berthelot. She kept it in her house at Auteuil, but it bit everybody but her, and she got rid of it. Colette has a way with cats, even lions and tigers. She's gone into cages with them and has never been bitten or mauled. She not only looks these beasts steadily in the eye, but never stops talking to them. They are always fascinated. Once, during the war, she was asked to pass judgment on a pack of ragtail savage shepherd dogs hastily collected. (She has a way with dogs too,...)....The usual fierce and furious uproar was going on in the kennels when she arrived. Colette lifted her alto voice... and all the dogs stopped barking and snarling. They were tractable when she finally turned them over to their male trainers.
'...In Paris she lives in an apartment...on the Champs-Elysees. She has just been married for the third time.
'She writes her books in longhand, and is eccentric about the kind of paper she uses....
'Colette collects...ships in bottles,...anything carved in small hard stones, and Louis-Philippe floral paperweights, of which she has one of the finest collections there is. She will tolerate only one kind of wallpapaer, a glace chintz. When she went to Claridge's to live at one time, they had to put glace chintz paper on the walls for her.'
Colette, the queen of cat lovers, in 1935.
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