Novel: Chéri

Overview
"Chéri" (1920) charts a fraught, elegiac romance between Léa de Lonval, a celebrated aging courtesan, and Fred Peloux, nicknamed Chéri, the handsome son of a friend and protégé who has been both her lover and her project. Set in Belle Époque Paris, the narrative follows the slow unraveling of their arrangement as the couple confronts the passage of time, shifting desires, and the fragile balance of power between youth and experience. The tone blends intimacy and irony, producing a portrait of love that is at once passionate and corrosive.

Plot summary
The story begins with Léa's world of salons, lavish comforts, and social prominence, where she enjoys both admiration and autonomy. Chéri, now twenty-five, has grown complacent, drifting away from Léa into a life of indolence and casual pleasures. Their ten-year liaison, part affection, part convenience, stalls when Chéri becomes engaged to Edmée, a young woman from a respectable family. Léa's reaction is not merely jealousy but an acute recognition of mortality: the engagement exposes the limitations of the shelter their relationship provided.
Léa embarks on a journey of self-examination and subtle revenge, testing Chéri's feelings and forcing him to face the consequences of his choices. Encounters brim with social nuance and emotional restraint, culminating in a final, ambiguous reconciliation that reframes strength and surrender. The ending resists neat closure, emphasizing loss and the irreversible effects of time over tidy moral lessons.

Main characters
Léa de Lonval is intelligent, elegant, and sovereign in her manner. Her sexuality is intertwined with self-possession: she negotiates love and commerce with strategic grace, yet beneath her cultivated detachment lies profound vulnerability. Léa's age marks her not as diminished but as complex, she wields experience like a weapon and a shield, aware of societal double standards but unwilling to cede dignity.
Fred "Chéri" Peloux is charming, lazy, and impulsive. Spoiled by affection and the indulgence of his mother, he drifts between dependence and a desire for independence he cannot fully claim. His youth is both an advantage and a weakness; it allows for carelessness but also shields him from the gravity of choices until it is almost too late. Edmée, the fiancée, represents conventional respectability and the future Chéri might inhabit, but she also reveals the limitations of moral certainty when confronted with complex affection.

Themes
The novella interrogates aging and desire, showing how erotic attraction shifts with time and how attachments can alternate between tenderness and possession. Power dynamics are central: Léa's initial dominance obscures fragile selfhood, while Chéri's youthful privilege conceals insecurity. Social facades, salons, reputations, and marriage, frame private emotional economies, exposing tensions between public respectability and personal need. The narrative treats loss and longing without melodrama, finding tragedy in small betrayals and the cumulative erosion of intimacy.

Style and legacy
Colette's prose is precise, sensuous, and psychologically acute, capturing gestures and silences as tellingly as dialogue. Her observational prose renders interiors and social rituals with crystalline detail, turning the everyday into a stage for larger emotional truths. "Chéri" remains influential for its frank yet empathetic exploration of female desire and aging, and for portraying characters who resist simple moral categorizations. The novella's elegiac quality and moral ambiguity continue to resonate, inviting readers to sit with discomfort rather than seek resolution.