d Cherf are already involved at the novel's start. Yet since the novel works from a premise of cynicism, Colette seems intent on highlighting the ambivalences and antagonisms which develop between the sexes. After they have briefly flirted with a lingering kiss and Cherf announces his sexual interest in LTa, "they faced each other as enemies" (27). Colette indicates that an animosity develops between the sexes even as the mutuality of their physical attraction begins. For once Cherf focuses on LTa as his potential lover, she becomes the one who can either fulfill his deepest desires or denies them. In Colette's writings lovers are always battling against this potential dependency. Sexuality as exhibited by LTa and Cherf arises as an attempt to gain the upper hand, to control the other without one's own self being manipulated.
When LTa and Cherf do kiss passionately for the first time, they are left "trembling as if they had been fighting" (27). Although LTa tries to resist the advancing passions of Cherf, she is left listlessly wondering about the "unfulfilled promises of the kiss at Neuilly" (29). Colette depicts LTa's attraction to Cherf as embedded in the appeal of the exotic. In the book's first description of him, he is seen wearing "Moorish slippers" (1) and later when LTa refers to their sexual relations she asserts that sleeping with him is like being "in bed with a Chinee or African" (28). This underscores the radicality of the other chosen for l
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