Wonderful, evocative little stories, ranging from funny--for example the hilarious story of an obsessive bull dog (see the end of my review) and confessions of a naturalist bullied by his queenly pet Siamese (although you have to ask yourself who "owns" whom in that relationship!)--to deathly serious, e.g. the scathing and witty critique of the experiments being conducted at the time of writing by Pavlov and his students.

Surprisingly, I found this linguistically more difficult than Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, which I am also reading at the moment. Perhaps it's because Colette uses very rich, floral language as well as names French animals (wildlife), neither of which I have come across often, if at all, in the course my French studies. I don't like to use a dictionary when reading French as it stops me from enjoying the process, only ever resorting to it if the same word comes up several times and it becomes obvious that I have to look it up in order to understand what's going on. As a result, my comprehension was patchy.

Nonetheless, I loved this. The 50-60% of the text I understood was moving and funny. I hope in some years, as my French improves, I'll come back to this and get more out of that missing 40-50%.

One of my favourite stories is 'La Chienne bull', wherein the narrator, owner of an obsessive pet bull dog, feeling guilty and self-conscious at inadvertently causing her pet to suffer due to her (the bull dog's) intensity of attachment, implores the dog to stop gazing at her so unnervingly: Sleep! Or pick up a book! Or do some cross-stitch!

It took me quite a while to stop giggling over that one! ( )