When I had reached my term, I looked like a rat dragging a stolen egg.

Colette’s simile is a deliberately unglamorous, comic image for late pregnancy: the speaker feels furtive, burdened, and physically altered, as if carrying something conspicuously “stolen” and awkwardly held. By choosing a rat—an animal associated with scavenging and shame—she punctures sentimental ideals of maternity and replaces them with bodily truth, self-mockery, and a sharp eye for how pregnancy can make one feel both conspicuous and ungainly. The line also shows Colette’s characteristic candor: she refuses euphemism, using vivid, sensory metaphor to reclaim the experience in her own language rather than in socially approved terms.