Balzac was a strong literary influence on Colette. One commentator has counted no fewer than fifty-five references to the great nineteenth-century novelist or his work in Colette's writings. However, the most immediate precedent for such a novel as The Vagabond was the spate of novels by women about sex and erotic adventures. These, though, had valid bases in works by Balzac and Gautier which contain, for example, treatments of lesbianism. This topic and pederasty had appeared in a number of novels, many of them by female authors around the turn of the century. The difference, of course, is that Colette took the subject seriously.

Despite her admission that, particularly in her earlier titles, she sometimes injected sexual details for the purpose of appealing to readers, she dealt with love on all levels as an important matter.

A striking example can be found in The Ripening Seed...