Friday, Oct. 18, 1963
Books: Regarde
THE BLUE LANTERN by Colette. 161 pages. Farrar, Straus. $3.95.
The last word uttered by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette on her deathbed in Paris in 1954 was "regarde." To her, it meant to look, feel, wonder, accept, live. For all her 81 years she obeyed that injunction with an immense, daylight sense of reality and a pagan delight in the sensuous experiences that delivered the world to her mind and to the blue note paper on which she recorded it. The Blue Lantern, written between 1946 and 1948 and now translated into English for the first time, is Colette's last major work—a moving but unsentimental record of how it was with a poet of the senses whose senses were failing...
