The best precedent for most of Colette's fiction is the work that she had already done. As Janet Planner has observed, more than any other leading female European writer, Colette wrote about what she knew. She tended to take little from other people's books.

However, two now virtually unknown (at least in America) French women writers, the Countess de Noailles and the Princess Bibesco, had dealt with similar arrangements between people — but, not nearly so well. Since the character Cheri may be styled on Auguste Heriot, a man whom Colette knew very well, the precedent for these novels is probably more personal than literary. The libretto of DerRosenkavalier, of course, contains such a liaison, as does Benjamin Constant's 1816 novel Adolphe. There is no precedent, in life or art, for the superlative quality of the representation of life in these novels.