How can one help shivering with delight when one's hot fingers close around the stem of a live flower, cool from the shade and stiff with newborn vigor!

Colette’s sentence captures a characteristically sensuous, bodily form of attention: delight is not abstract but registered in temperature, texture, and the small shock of contact. The “hot fingers” meeting a flower “cool from the shade” stages a vivid contrast—heat and coolness, human restlessness and vegetal freshness—that produces a pleasurable shiver. The phrase “stiff with newborn vigor” personifies the flower as newly alive, suggesting renewal and immediacy rather than sentimental prettiness. The line exemplifies Colette’s broader celebration of the everyday natural world as a source of intense, almost erotic vitality, where perception itself becomes a kind of happiness.