Colette’s dawn excursions in search of berries

Colette’s dawn excursions in search of berries are remembered as more than a childhood outing: they give her an early, bodily sense of self through solitary communion with nature. Leaving home at half-past three with empty baskets, she returns only after gathering fruit, circling the woods, and drinking from two hidden springs; on the road, she experiences herself as part of the first stirrings of the day.

The Excursions

Colette’s mother made the early starts possible, waking her at half-past three as a reward. With an empty basket on each arm, Colette set out toward kitchen gardens tucked into a narrow bend of the river, looking for strawberries, blackcurrants, and hairy gooseberries. The excursion joined a practical purpose—bringing back berries—to the freedom of wandering alone.

The landscape is described through the child’s movement across it. At that hour everything remained asleep in a primal blue, while heavy mist rose from her legs to her body and face. Colette made a great circle through the woods, like a dog hunting on its own, and drank from two hidden springs she worshipped. She returned when the bell rang for the first Mass, but only after eating her fill and completing her solitary circuit.

A Discovery of Self Through Nature

The decisive moment occurs on the sandy road: Colette says that she first became aware of herself there, experiencing an inexpressible state of grace and a sense of unity with the first breath of air, the first bird, and the newly risen sun. Self-discovery is not presented as inward reflection apart from the world. It comes through the senses and through the landscape’s changing signs of morning—the mist, the air, the bird, and the sun.

The episode gives movement and specificity to the larger account of the adolescent girl’s relation to nature. Because she has not yet established a place for herself in the human world, nature can seem to offer the whole universe rather than a limited possession. Colette’s excursion figures that possibility as lived experience: she crosses the woods freely, tastes its fruit and water, and describes an awakening in which the outside world and her emerging sense of self coincide.

Place in the Account

The remembered outing stands as an example of how a girl’s intense attention to the world may appear in forms other than sustained creative work. The surrounding discussion describes observation, feeling, and recording as sources of a distinctive sensibility, even where the girl rarely feels a creative impulse or lacks the means to express it. Colette’s account preserves such sensibility in a concrete scene: the hunt for berries becomes an occasion to perceive and inhabit the world, not merely to collect from it.

The excursion’s pattern is both ordinary and charged: a mother grants permission, the child leaves before dawn, she gathers and eats, and she returns at the first Mass bell. Within that simple sequence, the solitary journey becomes a first experience of selfhood and a moment of belonging to a natural world still waking around her.