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Composition and Colette's feline household

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette wrote La Chatte during the summer of 1933 at her rented villa La Gerbière in Montfort-l'Amaury, completing the manuscript in fourteen weeks. She was 60, recently divorced from journalist Henry de Jouvenel, and living with her future third husband Maurice Goudeket. The household kept three Chartreux cats at the time, the senior of whom, named La Chatte Dernière, became the working model for Saha. Colette had already produced two non-fiction cat books, Dialogues de bêtes (1904) and La Paix chez les bêtes (1916), and the nouvelle marked her first attempt to place a cat at the structural centre of a novel rather than as observational material.

Publication and translations

Bernard Grasset published the first French edition of La Chatte on 30 May 1933 in his Pour Mon Plaisir series. The English translation by Antonia White appeared in 1936 from Secker & Warburg under the title The Cat, and a second English version by Morris Bentinck was issued by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1953. The novella has been translated into at least 17 languages, most recently into Korean (Open Books, 2014) and Mandarin (Shanghai 99 Readers, 2018), and remains in print under Le Livre de Poche as part of Hachette's permanent Colette catalogue.

Plot mechanics and the balcony scene

The story turns on a love triangle between silk merchant Alain Amparat, his new wife Camille Malmert, and the Chartreux Saha, whom Alain installed in the couple's Paris apartment after marriage. Camille, jealous of the daily ritualised affection Alain gives the cat, pushes Saha from the ninth-floor balcony of the rue Berthe-Morisot building. Saha survives because she lands on a striped awning two floors below. Alain, on returning home, deduces the act from a single torn claw embedded in the awning fabric, removes the cat to his mother's house at Neuilly, and ends the marriage.

Adaptations and curriculum status

Henri Decoin directed a 1958 French film adaptation with Françoise Arnoul as Camille and Michel Auclair as Alain, filmed in Eastmancolor at the Studios de Boulogne. The novella has appeared continuously on the French lycée reading list maintained by the Ministère de l'Éducation Nationale since 1971 and remains a set text for the option littérature of the baccalauréat L track.