Colette Peignot

Their relationship was a tumultuous one: Ella Maillart, a friend of Colette Peignot, reports that she said on the first evening: “I want to drink your blood from your mouth”.

In 1928, after or during a stay at the Leysin sanatorium, she met Eduard Trautner, a doctor, poet and writer close to communist circles, and a friend of Brecht.

129  of the Hohenzollerndamm) in total seclusion and submission: a fine scholar, Trautner is a lover of Sade and Sacher-Masoch, and his fantasies resonate with the nihilism of his prey.

[6] There she met Boris Souvarine, one of the founders of the French Communist Party, (nicknamed "Léon Bourénine" in the Écrits de Laure) with whom she maintained a peaceful but sad relationship.

In his wake, she joined and actively participated in the meetings of the Democratic Communist Circle, where she met the philosopher Simone Weil with whom she formed a deep friendship, as well as Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau, Pierre Kaan, and Karl Korsch.

Their “intense” [9] relationship turns out to be destructive mess, between alcoholism, public humiliations, and a tour of brothels, but also worldly and cultured, in the company of Michel Leiris, André Masson, Roger Caillois, Pierre Klossowski and Denise Rollin.

[11][12] Just before closing the coffin, Michel Leiris slipped five dice into it, “concretions of destiny that we hold in the hand”; for his part, Georges Bataille throws a few pages of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake onto the remains.

She wandered from sanatoriums to rest homes, a medical nomad at a time when tuberculosis was treated through inactivity: Vernet-les-Bains in 1919, Barèges, Lourdes and Lavernoze in 1923, Banyuls in 1926, Bois-Cerf, Céret, Prats-de-Mollo, and Laccabanasse in 1927, Leysin in 1928, Combloux in 1930, etc.

Her nephew, the poet Jérôme Peignot (who thought of Colette as a “diagonal mother”), republished the manuscripts in 1971 and 1977, despite the same family's opposition.