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I finally got round to proof-reading/editing this; it was actually complete at the end of April, *before* I even started on What's in a Name, but with the rush to complete the competition entry in time plus the knowledge that there was next to no potential audience for Colette-fic, I didn't have much motivation to work on it. (Plus the dispiriting discovery that the script of the film had apparently used large chunks of the original dialogue verbatim...)

I'm still not quite certain if the irony of the title works better -- or, rather, is more apparent -- if I use "White Knight" or "The White Knight", but I tried it with 'The' and it didn't look quite right, so I'm going back to "White Knight" for now. And at 5,500 words I think it will work as a rather long one-shot... even if "If I Were Vicomte" has *four* chapters in that same length!

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White Knight

World-weary Gaston Lachaille sees himself as perfectly positioned to offer a solution to Gigi’s situation. He misjudges things in more ways than one.

When Gaston Lachaille had returned at length to Paris, still nursing his wounded amour-propre and the cuckold’s horns bestowed upon him by the perfidious Liane, it was to find Gigi dressed up like an organ-grinder’s monkey.

He had not, in that first moment, been able to imagine what old Madame Alvarez could conceivably have had in mind to allow it. The contrast between the scapegrace urchin he remembered and the gawky adolescent plucking at the collar of her new-found finery had been too great for anything but an almost physical recoil. ( Read more... )

Well, I now have a title for the Gigi-story: [The] White Knight (ironically of course).
And the summary is going to read something along the lines of "Bored playboy Gaston Lachaille sees himself as being in the perfect position to help Gigi cope with her situation. Only he misreads things in more ways than one." (With the wording improved considerably, I hope -- but I'll leave this rough one up here for my future edification :-p)

Now I just need to sit down and type the thing. I decided to end it with Gaston hovering on the doorstep and thinking of marriage as a way *out* of the humiliating Gigi-situation, but without its occurring to him that he could, in fact, marry *her* (which of course he is not in a position to anticipate as a possibility at that point). So it shouldn't be too large a jump from there to suppose that in the following canon scene when she does throw herself at him, marriage immediately springs to his mind ;-)

How well it will work for a canon-blind audience who have no reason to suppose that Gigi has any likelihood of softening towards him, I don't know... (Also, the way I have written her dialogue currently makes her sound *very* immature, which may not be the best representation of the French version -- or one that makes her sound at all like marriageable material!)

I finally bit the bullet and sorted out the Demon Red chilli pot; the chillies themselves were pretty easy to identify since they were the sprouts with no root to speak of, which at least made it relatively easy to transplant them back into sterile compost -- yet again, I was astonished to find a fairly large and vigorous worm in that pots, where there had previously been no sign of it but where it had at least been getting watered, and another in the supposedly dried-out spent compost bag, where it had now been surviving ever since October...

I split the rest of the plants between two pots, and dumped them out into the outdoors temperatures to take their chance, with no gesture at hardening-off.( Read more... )

( Tomatoes )

( Garlic )

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I had an idea about how to make my Gaston rewrite scene more interesting, namely by jumping ahead (of course) and putting in an episode where he *does*, in fact, go back to Liane d'Exelmans that evening, in the interval between walking out without his hat and coming back for it shamefaced the next day. Not canonical, but it is in fact suggested as a possibility (Lachaille est parti d’ici dans l’état d’esprit où un homme fait toutes les bêtises! [...]On me dirait qu’à l’heure qu’il est il est fiancé, ou en train de se remettre avec Liane, je n’en serais pas surprise) And it makes the end of the story into something more than just a rewrite... although I still don't know what I'm going to do for an actual end. ( Read more... )

https://www.ebooksgratuits.com/html/colette_gigi.html

My immediate reaction to this was that, as a short story, it felt like about half of a book with a chunk missing :( If the author had written the whole thing out with the same level of detail that she devotes to the initial set-up, then it would have been twice as long and probably a novel in its own right. But she spends a lot of time depicting her characters and their situation at the start, and then the dènouement feels suddenly stuck in out of nowhere, in a handful of scenes that feel disjointed with no clear progression between them. There didn't seem to be any stage of development or change from the initial relationship.

Perhaps this was because I was reading in French at about three am and thus not sensitive to all Colette's subtleties; there was certainly a large chunk of vocabulary at the start that was simply unfamiliar. (Mme Alvarez toisa sa petite-fille, du canotier en feutre orné d’une plume-couteau, jusqu’aux souliers molière de confection -- I'm assuming from context that this is describing Gigi's clothing, but without looking up all the period vocabulary I have no idea what it means, and have only learned that toiser means to look at somebody because I *did* have to look that up at a later point where it was plot-significant!) But Gaston seems to switch from viewing Gigi as a refreshingly unaffected child to viewing her as a potential mistress to acting the despairing lover without any obvious trigger or transition at all: there isn't any "But without your glasses you're beautiful, Miss Jones!" moment, or even any point where we see it visibly dawn on him for the first time that she has become an adult.( Read more... )