Among the most autobiographical of Colette's works, these four novels are dominated by the child-woman Claudine, whose strength, humor, and zest for living make her seem almost a symbol for the life force.Janet Flanner described these books as "amazing writing on the almost girlish search for the absolute of happiness in physical love . . . recorded by a literary brain always wide awake on the pillow."

    There is light, light everywhere, so much light that cries of admiration and astonishment are forced from us ; it is as if we issue from gloom into a clear air of boundless space. The passage from our Northern Autumn to the perpetual Summer that reigns here, is made almost imperceptibly by our modern ships that do not heed the wind. Silvery crested waves dance on the blue waters, and the sky seems more distant from the earth ; the clouds, too, have more definite form and are further off; new depths of space become ap-jmrent, and our horizon is extended.It seems as though our eyes could appreciate new forms and colours in the increasing brightness which we had been unable to perceive before. From what ;i land of shadows we must have come, and what can this festival of light be that has sprung on us suddenly and unbidden?A melancholy brightness pours relentlessly on this land of tombs, this country thick with dust of bygone races; but we forget it when we reach our northern clime, and are surprised to find it there once more on our return. Its rays shine constantly on the hot and languid gulfs, and on their sand or granite shores; it bathes the ruins and that world of dead stones which guard the ancestral faith and the secrets of those the Bible tells us of. This melancholy light is ever present, just as it must have been 1in the old, sacred times, and these things give our narrow imagination a sense of infinity, and tell of a time without beginning or end. The biblical times, however, whose antiquity inspires our trust, are but of yesterday when we look back on the history of the world, fearful in the immensity of the past. This Superb and intoxicating brightness is but the passing effect of our slowly decaying little sun upon a favoured zone of our still smaller earth, an earth that nestles close to him, as if frightened by the vast and chill orbits of the other planets. The blue sky too, enwoven with the phantasy of passing clouds, that looks so deep, is but a thin, deceptive veil that serves to screen the yawning space behind. No, this is all nothing, only the space behind is real. This empty space, this black abyss into which worlds ceaselessly fall, this kingdom that knows neither commencement nor decay, is the one eternal reality.