Critical Praise

“Everything that Colette touched became human . . . She was a complete sensualist; but she gave herself up to her senses with such delicacy of perception, with such exquisiteness of physical pain as well as physical ecstasy, that she ennobled sensualism to grandeur.”

—The Times (London)

“Dramatic and moving . . . [Chéri] endears itself to the reader partly because of its subject, but more because of the manner of its telling.”

—The New York Times

“A wonderful subject [treated with] intelligence, mastery, and understanding of the least-admitted secrets of the flesh.”

—André Gide