Colette and Marco

Colette and Marco are presented as friends whose intimacy offers a truthful alternative to the roles women perform in relations with men. Their friendship is at once a refuge and a practical collaboration: in private, they can relax, exchange advice, and prepare one another for the expectations and anxieties of courtship. Colette’s account makes this female space feel real not because it is free of romantic concerns, but because those concerns can be shared without the same performance required before a man.

Friendship Away from the Stage

The contrast begins with the distinction between being onstage with a husband or lover and being backstage among women. In the male world, a woman is described as maintaining an “imaginary personage” through impersonations, clothes, and catchphrases, while inwardly feeling that she is not herself. With other women, she can step out of that combat: the atmosphere is relaxed, and the practical preparations for facing men can be discussed openly.

Colette evokes her time with Marco as hours of confidences and amusement, sometimes resembling a sewing room and sometimes the idle rest of convalescence. The comparison joins companionship to repair. Their time together does not erase the demands that await them outside; it gives them a place to pause before returning to them.

Advice, Clothes, and Preparation

Colette recalls sitting beneath a balcony awning on hot afternoons while Marco mended her underclothes. Marco sewed poorly but conscientiously, and Colette took pleasure in advising her: she recommended finer thread for fine needles and pink rather than blue ribbon for lingerie. That exchange broadened into advice about face powder, lipstick, and the line Marco drew around her eyelids. Colette then took up the comb and arranged Marco’s fringe, showing her how to shade her eyes and add a light touch of color to her cheeks.

The scene gives Colette an active, authoritative role in a shared routine of self-presentation. Its detail is affectionate and gently comic, but it also shows the double character of the women’s backstage space: the friends can relax together, yet their conversation and care often concern how Marco will appear when she goes back before a man.

Helping Marco Face Courtship

In a later episode, Marco is preparing to meet a young man she hopes to win over. When she is about to wipe her wet eyes, Colette stops her and attends to her makeup so the tears will not disturb it. She retouches Marco’s features, adds a rosier shade of powder to the puff in her handbag, and urges her not to give way to tears. Marco submits patiently, while Colette’s careful assistance gives the moment the character of tending to someone in distress.

Once the makeup is finished, Marco turns to the practical uncertainties of the encounter. She regrets not buying a black dress at a secondhand shop the previous Saturday and asks to borrow very fine stockings. Colette agrees. Marco then wonders whether a flower might brighten the dress, rejects the idea of placing one on the bodice, and asks whether iris has gone out of fashion as a scent. Her sequence of questions reveals how much is at stake for her in preparing to be seen, while Colette’s steady replies make that preparation a task they undertake together.

A Shared Female Counter-World

The friendship illustrates the passage’s larger contrast between women’s public performance and their private companionship. A woman may feel required to fashion an acceptable persona for a husband or lover; among women, she can be a confidante, adviser, and helper rather than an opponent in the same contest. The preparations are still shaped by courtship, but the work is no longer solitary: clothing, makeup, and anxiety become subjects that can be handled in company.

Colette’s description of three sisters in Le toutounier extends this pattern beyond Marco. Unhappy or troubled in love, the sisters gather each night around the old sofa from their childhood. They reflect on the day’s worries and prepare for what lies ahead, while sharing rest, sleep, bathing, and moments of tears. They speak little, yet each creates a place of comfort for the others. Set beside Colette and Marco’s exchanges, this scene makes female friendship a recurring refuge: not an escape from the pressures of love, but a space in which women can face them together and be more truthful with one another than the roles imposed outside it allow.