’s pleas. This continues until Renee signs a contract for a six-week tour with Brague, her mentor, and his pupil. Now she must decide between Maxime and her career, as she recognizes that she cannot allow him to accompany her and is not yet ready to give up the wandering life, which somehow suits her. She then lies, promising to give herself to Maxime, but not until the tour is over. Renee leaves Paris, full of both hope and regret ().The concluding third of the novel recounts Renee’s travels from one place to another. This part of the story is told primarily in the form of letters to Maxime, sprinkled with accounts of performances, and thoughts about her relationship with him. The book ends with her final letter to him and the thoughts that she directs toward him as she leaves the letter are unfinished ().The Vagabond was the first novel that Colette wrote without the actual or claimed collaboration of her first husband Henry Gauthier-Villars, commonly known as Willy. Already a noted and admired writer at the time of its publication, Colette with this novel was acknowledged by French readers as one of the most prominent and talented writers of her time (Kingcaid 117). The book is unquestionably autobiographical in many ways-the facts of the heroine’s life, the character of her first husband, and the qualities of the heroine herself (Marks 21). Colette creates a world that has the authenticity of experience and the impact of shared emotions and ideas in The Vagabond. Joan Hinde Stewart, renowned critic, states, “The Vagabond…reads as a remarkably just and debonair study of a female consciousness waking to the possibility of independence-a feminist novel to shame, in its subtlety, the feminists” (qtd. in Strand 113). The language of the book is richly sensuous (Strand 113) full of physical and natural images (Strand 114) and both sensitive and straightforward. The descriptions of the charac...
