Letter Concerning
Her Pink Cactus
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
(1873 - 1954)

At the age of twenty, Colette Landoy married a prominent literary critic in Paris, Henri Gauthier-Villars, who persuaded her to write novels and then signed them with his own name. Parisians loved the "Claudine" series, as the books came to be known, but Colette suffered immensely in the marriage and eventually left Gauthier-Villars to begin writing under her own name. For almost fifty years she published one novel after another as well as essays and literary criticism. By the end of her life she was revered as "The Great Lady" of French literature. A few readers have begun to notice her spirituality, especially in relation to the beauty of nature, as in this remarkable letter written the year before she died, which honors a plant's blossoming as a divine epiphany.
-- Mary Ford-Grabowsky

Monsieur,

You invited me to visit you for a week, which means that I would be near my daughter, whom I adore. You who live with her know how rarely I see her, how much her presence delights me, and I am touched that you should ask me to come to see her. All the same, I am not going to accept your kind invitation, for the time being at any rate. The reason is that my pink cactus is probably going to flower. It is a very rare plant that was given to me and I am told that in our climate it blossoms only once every four years. Now I am already a very old woman, and if I went away when my pink cactus is about to flower, I am certain that I shouldn't ever see it flower.

So I beg you, Sir, to accept my sincere thanks and my regrets, together with my kind regards.

-- Sidonie Colette, née Landoy