Novel: La Chatte

Overview
La Chatte is a compact, intimate novella by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, published in 1933, that turns domestic life into a stage for fierce emotional observation. The story centers on a married couple whose private world is quietly overturned by the presence of a single animal: a beloved female cat. Colette uses that animal not as mere ornamentation but as an active focus and mirror for human desire, rivalry, and possessiveness, shaping a drama that is as much about temperament and habit as it is about moral choice.
The narrative unfolds in a close, domestic register, where the textures of daily life , the light across a room, the cat's specific movements, the small rituals of the couple , are rendered with Colette's characteristic sensual precision. The cat's independent, guarded nature and the wife's devoted tenderness toward it gradually expose fissures in the couple's intimacy and reveal the subtle mechanisms of jealousy and control.

Narrative arc
The plot follows the slow, inexorable intensification of tension between the spouses as the cat comes to occupy the emotional center of the household. At first the animal is simply a companion whose habits and moods are observed and accommodated. The wife's close, almost exclusive attachment to the cat elicits a mixture of amusement and irritation in her husband, who alternately tries to charm, command, and domesticate what resists domestication.
As the husband's irritation hardens into unease and then into something closer to envy, the couple's interactions shift from light intimacy to careful negotiation. Small episodes , moments when attention is refused, when the animal prefers one companion over the other, when a gesture is misread , accumulate until the couple must face the way desire can become territorial. The cat's autonomy continually undermines any easy hierarchy between the spouses, exposing how attachment can be both tender and possessive, protective and suffocating.
A turning point arrives when a crisis places the cat at the center of a moral and emotional test, prompting each partner to reveal what they will sacrifice and what they insist on keeping. That crisis forces a reckoning not only about the animal's role in their lives but about the limits of human claim over what one loves. Colette lets the consequences of that confrontation remain focused on feeling rather than on melodramatic action, so the resolution reads like the settling of a mood as much as the solution of a problem.

Themes and style
Colette's prose is famously tactile and observant; in La Chatte the language slips easily between the anatomy of an animal and the anatomy of human feeling. Themes of possession, competition, and the fragile boundaries between affection and domination recur throughout. The cat functions as a kind of barometer for authenticity of feeling: its refusals and preferences expose which affections are spontaneous and which are strategic.
The novella probes gender and power in domestic life without resorting to polemic. Instead, Colette privileges nuance: jealousy is shown as both comic and cruel, tenderness as both sustaining and binding. The animal's inscrutability allows the author to examine how people project meaning onto others and how love can be mistaken for ownership. The result is less a moralizing tale and more an acute psychological study conducted through small, precise scenes.

Significance
La Chatte sits within Colette's broader interest in the lived particulars of relationships and the material world that shapes them. It demonstrates her ability to turn a narrow subject into a wide-ranging meditation on intimacy, using an animal to illuminate human foibles. The novella remains notable for its elegant economy, its sensual detail, and its insistence that the ordinary furniture of life , a cat, a room, a daily routine , can reveal the deepest contours of the heart.