Books: L'Amour

BELLES SAISONS: A COLETTE SCRAPBOOK

Assembled and with commentary by Robert Phelps Farrar, Straus & Giroux;

302 pages; $15

The story of any love affair, Colette once claimed, can be told in a few words: "He loved me. I loved Him ... Then He stopped loving me and I suffered." Her own novels proved otherwise. Passion, in Colette's experience, dominated life, and she made her theme the pursuit of love, the treacherous ambiguities of sex. The Pure and the Impure, Cheri and The Ripening Seed pulse with an intensity unknown in French literature...

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