The heart and body
In discussing the difference between the heart and the body, Colette uses a metaphor to describe her thoughts:
“But what is the heart, madame? It's worth less than people think. it's quite accommodating, it accepts anything. You give it whatever you have, it's not very particular. But the body... Ha! That's something else again! It has a cultivated taste, as they say, it knows what it wants. A heart doesn't choose, and one always ends up loving.”
Here, she uses a metaphor to describe the body as having a "cultivated taste," suggesting it is harder to please than the heart.
Swift animals simile
Colette uses a metaphor in this passage to describe her partner:
"I liked being with him, as I like being with swift animals who are motionless at rest."
Purity metaphor
Colette describes how the word "pure" has never had a definite meaning for her, using a metaphor about how the concept is unreachable:
“The word 'pure' has never revealed an intelligent meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench and optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it - in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.”
