Colette had a ravenous appetite for life, a rebel's pursuit of pleasure, and a peasant's hard-eyed take on the world.
Surgeons are the gods of medicine.
Listen to Wagner Takes the A Train, and you might have the answer. In the Presence of Horses, is a brave and melancholy tale of loss. For most of her long life, Colette was in that special pantheon, beginning with her entrance into society as a daring young provincial who knowingly flirted with convention even as she thrust it aside and lasting through her final years when she was justly acclaimed the nation's most esteemed literary woman. From letters, memoirs, reminiscences, historical accounts and, most important of all, from Colette's own writings, biographer Judith Thurman gives a full-length portrait of a brilliant, maddening and thoroughly modern woman. Though her many novels and stories are available in translation separately and in collections, the one work most people know is probably Gigi , which was made into a lavish movie musical with Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier.