Colette Peignot (aka Laure) and Georges Bataille
No one has ever seemed to me as uncompromising and pure as she,
or more decidedly sovereign, and yet everything in her was devoted to darkness.
- Georges Bataille
I.
Colette Peignot was a French writer and poet, perhaps better known by the pseudonym Laure, who - thanks to ill-health, the death of her father in the First World War, and knowledge of the sexual abuse of her sister by a Catholic clergyman [1] - endured what might be described as a challenging childhood.
Out of such circumstances, however, a rebellious and free-spirited young woman emerged and, during her early 20s, she began to frequent the company of communists and surrealists and enter into tumultuous love affairs with older men who had a taste for cruelty.
Once, in 1927, after discovering she was pregnant and feeling exhausted following a flare up of her tuberculosis, Peignot shot herself in the chest; like Vincent Van Gogh. Unlike the unfortunate painter, however, she survived - the bullet having been deflected by a rib away from her heart - and went on to make a full recovery.
The following year, she met the German poet, physician, and pervert Eduard Trautner - a central figure in the Expressionist and New Objectivist movements - and moved to Berlin to be with him.
After a few months, however, the intensity of the relationship proved too great - Trautner would regularly beat her and obliged her to wear a dog collar - so Peignot fled Germany and sought refuge in the Soviet Union, living in Leningrad, Moscow and the Black Sea resort of Sochi, before retuning to Paris penniless and in poor health once more.
Figuring that she was probably never going to be rich or in good health - and not wanting a boring and bourgeois existence - she decided to throw herself into a life of dissolution, spending the last of her inheritence and pushing experience to the limit: it was thus almost inevitable that she would, sooner or later, become involved with Georges Bataille and serve as a living embodiment of one of his fictional heroines [2].
II.
During the summer of 1935, Laure and Bataille moved in together, having first briefly encountered one another four years earlier and become lovers in the summer of 1934. Thus began their mad affair, which combined debauchery with high culture in the company of artistic and intellectual friends.
He was undoubtedly attracted by her intensity and instability and the fact that she had such contempt "for anything devout or conformist" [3]. But he also sensed that they were extremely sympathisch. Not surprisingly, therefore, Laure soon found herself at the center of Bataille's secret society or post-Nietzschean religion - Acéphale - members of whom (almost exclusively male) met in the woods and discussed human sacrifice.
In a fascinating passage, Michel Surya argues that what distinguished them as a couple is that their love had nothing romantic or transformative about it:
"Nothing that puts love above everything and gives it meaning and salvation [...] no unity [...], nothing of the marvellous [...], no devotion of any kind. One might even go so far as to say that happiness was ruled out of Bataille's concerns with this love (happiness was too weak a concept ever to have interested him). On the contrary, he exacerbated both their wounds, even when they came at the highest cost. In fact this love resembles a twin descent into the depths; anguish is its key." [4]
Surya concludes:
"Colette Peignot's courage lay in responding to all this [...] the only one unafraid of what Bataille was blindly setting in motion. [...] The only difference was that everything in her led her to seek heaven, even in hell [...], while for him everything led him to make even heaven into a hell." [5].
Given this crucial difference, things were never going to end well ... and Laure confessed to Bataille before her death in 1938, aged 35, that although she had loved him and thought him a kind of god, she hated their life together, which, to be fair, can't have been a barrel of laughs [6].
Ultimately, I suppose it might be asked whether Laure was destined to die young (having lived fast):
"Could another way of life - less harsh and less debauched - have saved her? How much longer would she have lived had she been 'sensible'?" [7]
Probably a bit longer: but not much; her tuberculosis was already far too advanced in 1935 for any treatment to save her.
And besides, some only come into their lives posthumously ...
III.
After her death, two volumes of Peignot's work were published, hors commerce, under the name Laure, edited by Bataille and Michel Leiris:
Le Sacré (1939), is an assemblage of poems and fragments exploring themes of mysticism, eroticism, and revolution.
It was published only a few weeks after the author's death, against the wishes of her family, and distributed furtively to a selected (and limited) group of readers. It has been argued by one commentator that Bataille "effectively sanctifies Laure" [8] as the martyed figurehead of what Blanchot calls an unavowable community (i.e., one based on otherness and difference, rather than sameness and shared identity).
Histoire d'une petite fille (1943), meanwhile, is a semi-autobiographical text dealing with the traumas of childhood and how the narrator rebels against her middle-class Cathlolic background, rejecting social and moral convention so as to shape life in accordance with her own dreams.
As with the first book, the print run was extremely limited - just thirty-three copies of the fifty-five page book were produced - and copies were intended only for the personal use of the recipient [9].
Notes
[1] When Colette confronted her mother with the facts about this abuse, she not only refused to believe them, but accused her younger daughter of having a perverted imagination. That seems terribly unjust, but, as Mark Polizzotti remarks: "She wasn't entirely wrong, for while the incident cemented Laure's hatred of organised religion and its manifold hypocrisies, it also made her believe in an unbreakable link between the holy and the erotic."
See Polizzotti's review of Laure's Collected Writings, trans. Jeanine Herman (1995), titled 'Dirty's Story', in The London Review of Books, Vol. 18, No. 23 (November 1996): click here.
[2] It is often claimed that Peignot was the inspiration for the character Dirty in Bataille's novel Le bleu du ciel (written when he was involved with her in 1935, but not published until 1957, with the first English translation following in 1978).
However, as Michel Surya points out, this is doubtful as the character of Dirty was conceived long before Bataille met Colette Peignot; see p. 216 of the work cited below.
[3] Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzystof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (Verso, 2002), p. 165.
[4] Ibid., p. 201.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Bataille later expressed his feelings about their relationship in the essay Le coupable (1944), describing Laure as a unique spirit inextricably linked to his own life and work; a woman who oscillated between extreme audacity and dreadful anguish, looking for love whilst courting death and disaster.
[7] Michel Surya, Georges Bataille ... p. 257.
[8] See Milo Sweedler, 'From the sacred conspiracy to the unavowable community: Bataille, Blanchot and Laure's Le sacré', in French Studies, Volume 59, Number 3 (Liverpool University Press, July 2005), pp. 338-350.
[9] Fortunately for us, a complete edition of Peignot's writings, ed. Marianne Berissi and Anne Roche, was published by Éditions les Cahiers in 2019: click here for details. English readers without knowledge of French, however, will have to make do with Laure: The Collected Writings, trans. Jeanine Herman (City Lights Publishers, 1991).
