Laure: The Collected Writings

by Laure, Jeanine Herman (Translator), Georges Bataille (Contributor)

Laure (1903—1938) was a revolutionary poet, masochist Catholic rich girl, and world traveler. Toward the end of her life she became the lover of French writer Georges Bataille. Her writings and her real life story were remarkable in their violence and intensity, and her relationships with Bataille and Michel Leiris clearly influenced their works.

This complete collection of writings published for the first time in English includes “Story of a Little Girl,” about the Catholic priest who sexually molested her sister; “The Sacred,” a collection of poems and fragments on mysticism and eroticism; notes on her association with contr-attaque and acéphale, and her involvement with the Spanish civil war and the early years of the Soviet Union; a compendium of correspondence with her beloved sister-in-law and tortured love letters to Bataille; and an essay by Bataille about Laure’s death of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five.

Genres: Poetry, France, Classics, Fiction

318 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Colette Peignot (October 8, 1903 - November 7, 1938) was a French author who is most known by the pseudonym Laure, but also wrote under the name Claude Araxe.

She was profoundly affected by the deaths of her father, brothers and uncle during World War I. As a prominent member of Georges Bataille's secret society Acéphale, she had an intense affair with the author, whose Blue of Noon is based on events in their relationship. Indeed, she is known more as a biographical footnote; a volatile female personality amongst the inter war French avant-garde of literature and politics. Her works were published posthumously against the will of her brother, Charles Peignot, by her nephew, the poet Jérôme Peignot (who thought of Colette as a “diagonal mother”).

Reviews

[Michael A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing... if Bataille is the "shadow of post-structuralism", Laure is the shadow of Bataille. Of course, both are much more than this. But without Laure, would have become of Bataille's later works? The mutual influence on each other is clear, but to me it seems like Laure had a much stronger one on Bataille than vice versa. To discuss Laure in terms of Bataille is unfair to Laure, however, as she stands on her own - in fact, I actually think her short story "Story of a Little Girl" is better than any fiction Bataille ever wrote (and I love his fiction).

Her letters, notebooks, and fragments reveals a (quint)essentially Nietzschean outlook on life. Having been raised Catholic then abandoning it, and suffering from the disease that would later kill her (tuberculosis) all her life, she was still able to say "yes" to life, to affirm herself in the face of an ambiguous state of life and death. Despite her general pessimism towards politics (basically every side, though she did later state she was an anarchist - was she still this when she died? I have no idea) she still maintained an optimistic undertone. She says something along the lines of "many leftists are bad but without them fascism would win".

Her letters also reveal, what seems to me, a fundamentally anxious and highly self-critical viewpoint. This did more to humanize a very human person, her humanity bleeding through words.

She is like a mirror negative version of Bataille and Simone Weil put together, a "sovereign" individual (as Bataille calls her), completely different and apart yet totally enmeshed and together. Recommended to everyone - Laure is criminally underrated.

[Maddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a lot of problems with this - how Laure is defined by her great romances, or in other words, by the men around her. I don't mean to discredit the importance that love and the relationships we have as not being central to our lives, but I feel like she is defined by those around her. This is problematic for her writings are about defining or separating herself from the world around her.

Regardless, it has been a while since I've had a dead French woman to obsess over.

[april violet · Rating 4 out of 5]

It isn't difficult to see why Bataille was in love with Laure. She lived intensely and was at odds with her bourgeois and Catholic upbringing, but not without cost it seems. I sensed her desperation.

[Jena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laure is the literary grandmother of anyone who ever suspected female sexual subjectivity had something to do with the holy trinity of birth, life, and death. It's not incidental that the greatest philosophical works take place in the gutter.

[thevibe300 · Rating 4 out of 5]

i’m just a girl… evident mi a fost foarte usor sa ma identific cu originea si cu modul ei de a gandi si scrie

To live finally
Neither tormenting
nor tormented

[Léon Nullans]

i think i liked Une Rupture even more

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

They don't make little girls like Laure anymore. The fuel behind Georges Bataille finally gets her own collection of writings and it's a fascinating read. In fact she is sort of a walking and living Bataille novel. As a reader it's amazing to sit back and watch how certain individual react to their world, their time, and how the 20th Century unfold it with a great sense of erotica and adventure. As well as horror...

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

George Bataille has been a fascination of mine since I was a teenager. Colette Peignot has always been attached to his biography as his great muse. Laurie, a collection of her writings, turned her from a Batailleian biographical accessory to a three-dimensional person for me. Some really great work that helps situate her to the intellectual currents of the 1920s-1930s France, where she was an active member of the counter-culture movements around that time, from surrealism, libertinism, and Marxism to Anarchism.

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I keep returning

[Eris · Rating 5 out of 5]

boundless, incredible, and profoundly human

[carkey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve cried almost every single day after reading this book. I don’t think anything has affected me this much.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/4 stars

[Mavibi · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Je pense que tu n'as pas rien su de tout cela parce que tu étais trop occupé au bordel, alors je te préviens."

Il y a une urgence de Laure.

[Luciann Waldrup · Rating 4 out of 5]

wish there were more of her writings. so refreshing to have this perspective- albeit backed into yet another corner of men and their fake eroticism.

[luckwithanF]

what remains? what remains. maybe the time is right to read something by simone weil next!

[Angèle Thomas]

« La femme de » mais qui était tout aussi dingo que son gadjo

[Jason · Rating 2 out of 5]

i don't know about this book. Colette was fun and sweaty, but was she brilliant? Only time will tell.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laure: The Collected Writings by Laure (1995)