Bel-Gazou

Ah, dear readers, we are one day late in honoring the death of Colette, who breathed her last pretty prattle on August 3, 1954 at the grand age of 80. This passage is from her 1922 My Mother's House (NY: The Modern Library, 1995, p. 134):

Three shells, like flower petals, white, nacreous, and transparent as the rosy snow that flutters down from the apple trees; two limpets, like Tonkinese hats with converging, black rays on a yellow ground; something that looks like a lumpy, cartilaginous potato, inanimate but concealing a mysterious force that squirts, when it is squeezed, a crystal jet of salt water; a broken knife, a stump of a pencil, a ring of blue beads and a book of transfers soaked by the sea; a small pink handkerchief, very dirty.... That is all.

How lovely, the small world of a radiant child. And such language: shells petals; rosy snow; limpets like Tonkinese hats; squirts when squeezed, blue beads... soaked by the sea... handkerchief, very dirty.

So here's to you, Bel-Gazou, and the rosy snow of your fluttering.

From one fabulous gal to another, the Dickinsonian oracle salutes Colette thusly:

Were it to be the last
How infinite would be
What we did not suspect was marked
Our final interview.
(E. Dickinson, 1165)