Set in the bourgeois Belle Époque era of Paris, Cheri, an obscenely beautiful male demimonde is tutored in matters of l’amore by the beautiful but aging courtesan Lea. She has made a fine & lucrative career from being a lover, and he is pompously nonchalant as her beautiful spoiled fop.

For 6 years they indulge in a languorous affair while Lea grooms the shallow and immature youth. Lea is a generous lover, a surrogate mother, a best friend, a refuge, and Cheri her pupil, her pet, the son she never had; yet despite being so much to one another they never concede any depth of feeling for one another, the relationship being at once intensely symbiotic yet frivolous and casual. So when Cheri finally completes his tutelage and marries a patient young bride it comes as a shock to them both to find themselves rocked by the loss and confused by feelings of anguish and regret.

This novelette made literary waves in contemporary society at its release. While it lacks the raunchy shock-factor of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, its subtle sensuality & depiction of a love affair between an adolescent and a middle-aged socialite was nevertheless very bold for the time. Collete has an elegant turn of phrase that perceptively pinpoints our human vanities and frailties whilst also magnificently evoking the glamour and style of an age gone by. This is an antidote to gushing romances; Collette is stylishly blasé about the cloying sentimentalities of love and quietly acknowledges the universal fear of aging and of loneliness that we must all face eventually.

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