Retreat from Love

Retreat From Love is one of Colette's celebrated 'Claudine' novels. It was the first to be written under her own name, without the influence of her husband, the Svengali Willy, from whom she had recently separated. A tale of sexual and emotional trysts between three aristocratic youths, Retreat From Love shows the work of a newly mature Colette, a novelist who was now to be judged by the highest standards. In an isolated farmhouse in the Jura, Claudine awaits her husband Renaud's return from a Swiss sanatorium. She distracts herself by encouraging her young friend Annie to recount salacious episodes from her love life. When Renaud's homosexual son Marcel arrives Claudine sets about matchmaking, a fiasco she bitterly regrets.