In innovative fiction Colette continually explores how intimately love is connected to sorrow. In Cher? Colette presents lovers as antagonists while offering her readers a non-idealized view of love which more closely resembles human experience than the love routinely depicted in gothic romance. Magnetized by the polarizations she found characteristic of the love experience, Colette tries in this novel to show love sullied by its desire for purity which remains unattainable. At the turn of the this century Colette was one of the first to show how women were much less likely than men to idealize love. Forced to live out its deceptions, contradictions, and ambiguities, women were at a much greater disadvantage than men if they chose to see it unrealistically. Cher? and L?a serve as representatives of