“The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt,” said Colette. “When a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.” Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873 in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, a village in Burgundy. She began writing when she married the first of three husbands, Henry Gauthier-Villars, who coaxed the early Claudine stories from her. Colette performed on the stage from time to time, but it was as a writer that she won fame, making way for a new wave of independent female writers (Simone de Beauvoir, an avid reader of Colette, likewise challenged women’s roles). Her sophistication about society, sex, and love, the sensuality of her writing style, these went mainstream with the success of Gigi, a 1944 novella that was adapted into a play starring Audrey Hepburn and a 1958 M.G.M. musical starring Leslie Caron. This exhibition at the Bibliothéque Nationale de France presents over 300 items—manuscripts, paintings, prints, photographs. Organized into five themes, each section evokes the experience of Colette’s writing as it grew from correspondence, to draft, to published work. —Maggie Turner