"Je suis sans nouvelles de Sidi. Je me fais toute une chevelure de soucis."

Autograph letter signed by Colette addressed to her friend, the man of letters and lawyer Adrien Peytel, two pages written in black ink in hurried handwriting on a double sheet with L'Eclair newspaper letterhead.
A central fold inherent to the folding of the letter for mailing.
Fine letter from Colette, testimony to the confusion that seized France at the dawn of the Great War: "Nothing is working. I am stuck here for a piece they are asking me to write." The writer worries: "I have no news from Sidi [Henry de Jouvenel]. I am creating a whole head of worries for myself. I don't know where he is, he wrote to me that he was leaving with the 29th for the Somme. Ah! la la la la la la..."
"Colette a entendu sonner le tocsin en Bretagne, où elle passait un séjour ensoleillé avec le baron Henry de Jouvenel, et leur fille, dans sa maison de Rozven. La guerre la surprend en plein bonheur, à quarante et un ans. [...] Son mari, appelé dès le 2 août, devant rejoindre le 29e régiment d'infanterie, à Verdun, elle a aussitôt envoyé sa fille, à peine âgée d'un an, avec sa nurse, au château de Castel Novel, en Corrèze - chez sa belle-mère. Et elle est rentrée à Paris." ["Colette heard the tocsin ringing in Brittany, where she was spending a sunny stay with Baron Henry de Jouvenel, and their daughter, in her house at Rozven. The war surprised her in the midst of happiness, at forty-one years old. [...] Her husband, called up from August 2nd, having to join the 29th infantry regiment, at Verdun, she immediately sent her daughter, barely a year old, with her nurse, to the château de Castel Novel, in Corrèze - to her mother-in-law's. And she returned to Paris."] (Dominique Bona, Colette et les siennes)