"There is no denying that flowers are my delight."
"Purveyor to those who like mild aphrodisiacs in print" - Time magazine, 1934
"When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes."
"KIKI-THE-DEMURE (cat):
Certainly I can. My nose is highly educated. It's small, regular, wide between my eyes, delicate at the chamois-skin end of my nostrils; the lightest touch of a blade of grass, the shadow of smoke tickles and makes it sneeze. It doesn't bother about distinguishing the scent of moles from that of—hares, did you say? But it delights in the trace left by a cat in a hedge ... I've a charming nose. She calls it, "his pretty little nose of cotton velvet." Since my eyes opened on this world I've not known the day that someone has not uttered a truthful flattery on the subject of my nose. Now yours—is a rough-grained truffle. What makes you move it so ridiculously? At this very moment.
TOBY-DOG:
I'm hungry and I don't hear the plates."
Critics who describe the work of the French writer Colette (1873-1954) agree: no major writer in any language built so much literature so directly out of the immediate sensory world: the taste of a peach warm off the wall, the smell of a Burgundy garden after rain, the exact color of a lover's tired skin. She was an SEI, the sensory-aesthetic introvert in its highest literary realization, with a noticeable accent on IEI due to her time-soaked, melancholy undertone.
From the Claudine books through Sido, La Naissance du jour, Gigi, and the late journals, the constant is the physical world caught in the act of being delicious: gardens, animals, food, weather, rooms, bodies. Her genius was not invention (her plots were derided as "thin" by the "serious" critics), but a sensory registration so exact that the French regard her prose the way one regards a perfect meal. "Her greatest strength as a writer is an exact sensory evocation of sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and colours of her world," Britannica claims. Her fictional world, even at its most scandalous, is fundamentally a world of naps, hearths, gardens, and tables. She stayed in Nazi-occupied Paris, kept her head down, published where publication was possible, even in pro-Nazi newspapers, and worked quietly to free her Jewish husband from Gestapo detention — a reasonable strategy, in retrospect, and one typical for SEI.
The creative function is what made her initially famous. Colette was a performer — literally: six years on the music-hall stage as mime and dancer, half-nude in pantomimes, touring the provinces. Her relationship scandals were ones of feelings and sensory appetite, never of ideology (SEI is likely the least ideological of "ascending" quadra types, and SLI is the least ideological of all, showing how Si is the de-facto "third descending" function). "The flesh, always the flesh, the mysteries and betrayals and frustrations and surprises of the flesh," as she herself put it in The Pure and the Impure. It's no accident Anaïs Nin remarked: "I've felt that her perceptions, her feelings about food, gardens, the sea are beautiful. She was a peasant-that was her saving grace. And yet so elegant in her style. But I love the peasant in her, the one who delights in smells and tastes. I never tasted a of chocolate like her chocolate." As suitable for Alpha SF type, she had a very high olfactory sensitivity. Her seductive qualities were due to her creating a romantic, but mostly introverted, passive mood (unlike the seductions of SEE's and IEE's).
Her sensuality, however, includes some time-travelling Ni component to the extent unusual in a "pure" SEI type. Her usual register was perhaps more melancholy than typical for SEI, although the type already leans Mel-Sang in temperament. Her masterpiece, the Chéri diptych, is at bottom a novel about aging: the courtesan Léa's richly described, clear-eyed registration of her own decline. She was a master of using sensory details, such as the scent of a flower, to evoke intense, piercing nostalgia. Pure Si — the Rossini pole, pleasure in the present, full stop — does not generate this, it is an infusion of the intuition of time and its additional melancholy themes. It's no accident that out of four types who contemplate their own death the most, three — IEI, EIE, ILI — are Ni egos, and the fourth — EII — still has this function as strong (in LIE the "passive suffering" component of Ni is mostly suppressed). Even Ni-ish themes of death and decline, however, in Colette, are registered sensually and calmly — as changes in the body and the light, one more thing to look at accurately — and the response is the return to the concrete. The time-consciousness serves the sensory savoring. Look at the Dialogues of Animals quote: a first-person aria of sensory self-connoisseurship, delivered from inside a cat's nose!
Interestingly, she did not like writing and didn't regard it as some kind of moral or principles duty. By her own persistent account, she wrote reluctantly, under compulsion — first of her first husband Willy, who discovered his young wife's talent, signed her Claudine novels himself, pocketed the fortune, and (in her own later telling) kept her at the desk until the pages were done; afterward, the gentler but equally necessary compulsion of deadlines and money. It is the highly "irrational" (perhaps even more irrational than your average SEI) comfort-type's relation to its own gift.
The Church refused her its rites, The Republic answered by giving her what no Frenchwoman had ever received: a state funeral, six thousand mourners filing past the flag-draped catafalque in the Palais-Royal courtyard.
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