January 30, 2023 • 35 mins
Love, passion, desire and pleasure are running themes in Colette's writing and her life. And that life was seen as really scandalous and even notorious, especially in her younger years.
Research:
- Roberts, Michele. "Chic lit: The enduring fascination of Colette." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6220, 17 June 2022, p. 5. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A707876520/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=41de6a9f. Accessed 14 Dec. 2022.
- Hoeness-Krupsaw, Susanna. "Colette: Overview." Feminist Writers, edited by Pamela Kester-Shelton, St. James Press, 1996. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420001782/LitRC?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=69de6bc0. Accessed 14 Dec. 2022.
- Davies, Margaret. "(Sidonie-Gabrielle) Colette." French Novelists, 1900-1930, edited by Catharine Savage Brosman, Gale, 1988. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 65. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1200003919/LitRC?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=1724173b. Accessed 14 Dec. 2022.
- Janeway, Elizabeth. “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” New York Times. 5/1/1966. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/10/17/specials/colette-delights.html
- LaPointe, Michael. “The Brilliance of Colette, A Novelist Who Prioritized Body Over Mind.” The New Yorker. 11/15/2022. https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-brilliance-of-colette-a-novelist-who-prized-the-body-over-the-mind
- Evans, Elinor. “Who was the real Colette?” History Extra. 1/9/2019. https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/colette-film-history-keira-knightley-wash-westmoreland-french-writer-sidonie-gabrielle-willy-claudine-novels/
- Allen, Brooke. “Colette: The Literary Marianne.” The Hudson Review , Summer, 2000, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer, 2000). https://www.jstor.org/stable/3852872
- Thurman, Judith. “Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette.” Ballantine Books. New York. 1999.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It's been
a few years since we had some kind of love
story leading up to Valentine's to Day. I know this
(00:23):
is coming out a little earlier than Valentine's Day. We
had a little schedule switchery, but I felt like doing
some kind of love story something this year, and I
chose French author Collette. Love, passion and desire and pleasure
all running themes and her work and in her life,
(00:43):
and that life was seen as really scandalous and even notorious,
especially in her younger years. Uh. This this turned out
to have a lot more mess than I knew. There
was gonna be some mess, but there was more more
mess than I really was expecting by the time of
her death. Though Collette was regarded as a national icon
in France, they could be really tricky to sort out
(01:07):
some of the details, though, because she intentionally incorporated her
life into her fiction, to the point that there's some
widely repeated tidbits that are found in her books but
really contradict things that she actually told people about her life.
And while her writing really suggested that people, especially women,
(01:29):
should just be free to live their lives as their
very full, authentic selves, she also had a curated persona,
so maybe having that persona was her unique self. It's
hard to tell sometimes though, like was this her true
feeling or was this the public self she was presenting
to people. While I was working on this, I alternately
(01:52):
found things that made me go, wow, you were amazing
and I love you, Collette, and then other parts that
made me go, wow, you are horrible. Some of the
things that really scandalized French society during Collette's lifetime are
commonplace and even mostly accepted today, but parts of it
are more troubling now than they were then. So during
(02:14):
this two parter, we're gonna be talking about some relationships
that may have been eyebrow raising at the time, but
they weren't necessarily criminal today, though if we were talking
about the same relationships, we would probably be describing them
more as sexual abuse or rape than as a relationship.
So Collette was born Sidney Gabriel Collette on January eighteen
(02:36):
seventy three in Saint Severan Puis, which is in the
Burgundy region of France. If Burgundy is conjuring up images
of wine and beautiful vineyards, that is not what this
part of Burgundy was like. It was nicknamed the Poor
Burgundy because it was mostly home to woods, ravines, and
impoverished farms. Her father was Jules Colette, who had been
(02:58):
an officer and one of the French light infantry regiments
known as the Zuave, which included a lot of soldiers
from northern Africa. One of his legs had been amputated
after he was struck by a cannonball during the Wars
of Italian Independence, and he had been awarded the Quadi
Ger and also granted a post as a tax inspector.
(03:19):
Colette's mother, Sidony, was descended in part from a slaveholding
family who lived in the French colony of Martinique. She
had some African ancestry through her grandfather, Robert Landois. Colette
knew about her ancestry, and some sources describe it as
a source of pride for her, but surviving letters really
don't come across that way, both in her descriptions of
(03:42):
how she imagined her ancestors in the Caribbean and at
one point her description of it in a letter as quote,
a stain of black in my blood. Colette's mother, Sidney,
was already married when she met Jules Colette, and it
was rumored that her second child was father by Jules
rather than by her husband. Jules and Sydney got married
(04:05):
eleven months after her first husband's unexpected death. Jules and
Sydney then had two children together. The second of those
children was Collette, so she was the youngest of a
sibling and two other half siblings. Her family called her Gabrie,
and one of her mother's pet names for her translated
to golden sunshine. Before Colette was born, her family had
(04:28):
been pretty well off, especially compared to most of the
other people where they were living. Sidney and her older
two children had inherited a significant amount of money and
property from her late first husband, but Sidny and Jules
did not manage that fortune very well. A lot of
their wealth was in land that Jules really didn't know
(04:48):
how to manage, and he seems to have made some
pretty bad investments into things like farm equipment that really
didn't return a profit. Sidny and Jules also both liked
luxury and had some very expensive tastes and hobbies, and
they taught their children to appreciate things like food and wine.
Jules also had a love of science that led him
(05:09):
to buying lots of intricate instruments. Collette's childhood seems to
have been mostly happy, though Sidney was an avid gardener.
Collette described her mother as truly coming alive in the garden.
She taught her children to love nature and plants. They
had lots of pets, and Collette always really really loved
(05:30):
and had a deep affinity for animals. There was also
a library that the children could access without a lot
of restrictions. There were only a few books in there
that they were not allowed to read. Collette stressed that
she was not a bookish child, though she loved to
be outdoors. She loved to be in the garden and
in the woods. The families dwindling income eventually affected Colette
(05:52):
and her siblings, though, when her half sister Juliet married
a doctor in eighteen eighty five, Jules had to borrow
money for her dowry, something that he should have been
able to do out of Juliet's inheritance from her father,
and this led to a whole bunch of suspicion on
the part of Juliet's new in laws, who wanted to
basically audit the Collette family's finances. Collette attended a local
(06:17):
public school, and once she was old enough to go
to a boarding school as her siblings had done, there
just wasn't enough money to send her, and also her
mother really didn't want to part with her. The family's
lack of funds also made it unlikely that they could
find a suitable husband for Collette, and marriage was the
(06:37):
expected and really only acceptable path for a young woman
of her class. This was really one of the many
contradictions in Colette's life. In a lot of ways, Sudany
was unconventional and really ahead of her time. She was
an atheist and raised her children to believe that they
were special, and she really didn't expect them to conform
(06:58):
to the Catholic social standards of the community they were
living in. She absolutely, though, expected them to get married
and have families. Colette's parents had been selling off their
farmland to cover expenses and debts, and as she entered
her teens, the land and the money were almost entirely gone.
They were living almost exclusively on a pension Jules had
(07:21):
earned with his military service and with his family's lifestyle,
that just wasn't enough. Eventually they had to move in
with Colette's half brother, who had become a doctor. So
when Colette started showing an obvious attraction to one of
the family's social connections, her parents were relieved, in spite
of this man's reputation as a philanderer and the huge
(07:43):
gap in their ages. This man was Alre Galtier Villar,
also known as Vali, who was a journalist in a
music critic. They met in eight nine, when Colette was
sixteen and really was thirty. Colette was immediately infatuated, but
we did not return her affections. At first, he was
involved with a married woman named jermin Serva. Willie described
(08:07):
German as his first great love. Eventually, Willie and Germaine
had a son together named Jacques, at which point her
husband divorced her, and then Willie legally recognized his child. Um.
I will note that I've heard people pronounce his name
as the English name Willie, and then also as like
more of a French vally. Sort of depends on who's talking.
(08:30):
I think his relationship with Colette, though, seems to have
started after Germaine died suddenly in At that point, Jacques
was only two. He asked Colette's parents to help him
find a wet nurse, and then Colette was sometimes called
on so basically babysit this little boy. There are some
(08:51):
things that are really unclear about Wally's relationship with Colette.
As we said earlier, to her family, it was a
huge relief because she didn't really have any other prospects
for a marriage. But his family was a different story.
They saw Colette's lack of dowry and her family's financial
situation as a problem. While Collette was deeply in love
(09:14):
with Willie, his letters from this period don't really suggest
that he felt the same way. He was really grief
stricken over Germaine's death. It's possible that there was some
kind of bigger scandal lurking that he was hoping to
avoid by marrying Colette. According to her third husband's second
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wife much later in her life, Colette told him that
Wally had raped her before their marriage, But various correspondence
about these marriage arrangements really don't suggest that something like
that was like motivating her parents into essentially blackmailing him
into marrying her, but Willie and Colette were married on
(09:55):
May fifte when she was twenty and he was third five.
The couple moved to Paris, and Willie sent Jacques to
be raised by a grandmother. After the wedding, Willie's family
cut him out of his position in the family publishing
business and reduced his income Outside of her fiction, Collette
(10:16):
didn't leave a lot of documentation about the first year
of their marriage. She wrote letters to her mother, but
those letters were destroyed after her mother's death. In later years, though,
she said this was one of the most unhappy periods
of her life and we will talk about it more
after a sponsor break. In a lot of ways, Collette
(10:44):
didn't conform to what was expected of girls and young
women at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in
the area where she grew up. She had started going
only by Colette while still in school, like a lot
of boys called each other only by their last name Aims.
She had encouraged her school friends to start doing the same.
She had idolized her unconventional mother and had been a
(11:08):
lot more interested in rambling in the outdoors than learning
all the domestic skills involved with keeping a home. She
was lively and curious and personable, but she wasn't seen
as particularly feminine. But when she arrived in Paris with Willie,
she didn't really fit in there either. She dressed and
acted like someone from the country. She wore her hair
(11:29):
in two very, very long braids, and while a lot
of people commented on how beautiful her hair was, this
style also made her look like a little girl, and
this was kind of a theme in Collette's life. She
did not want to get old, and she did everything
that she could to put off aging. But she also
seems to have intentionally made herself look even younger than
(11:51):
she was during her relationship with Willie, because she knew
he liked younger women, and she was constantly out in
public among people whose habits and Moray's were not at all,
which she was used to. Since Wally was a theater critic,
he was expected to go to pretty much every performance
and cultural event that there was. She was expected to
(12:13):
go with him a lot of the time, and at
the same time, he was very controlling of her. He
was stingy with his money. He refused to give Collette
an allowance that she might have used to like update
her style and wardrobe to more fit in with the society.
He would buy things for her to wear, but not
necessarily things that she liked. It all, she started to
(12:33):
make friends, but she still felt really lonely. Then, in
eighteen ninety four, Collette got an anonymous letter, and this
letter told her where she could go if she wanted
to catch her husband with another woman. She went, and
she did catch him, and she was devastated. Soon after this,
she became seriously ill and it took her months to recover.
(12:57):
Some accounts interpret this illness as a psycho logical breakdown,
but others describe something that involved more of a lingering fever.
Although really had his byline on a lot of writing,
a lot of that writing had been done by other people.
Sometimes he's described as having an army of ghost writers
or running a ghostwriting factory. Some of his writers were
(13:19):
at the start of their careers. Others were a lot
more prominent and just needed the money. He was really
good at marketing and especially self promotion, and that meant
that somebody writing stuff that he was taking credit for
could potentially make a lot of money doing so so.
For some people that felt worth it even though they
weren't actually getting credit for their own work. In he
(13:43):
started using that army of ghost writers to turn out fiction.
Most accounts say that really suggested that Collette write down
the story she had been telling about her days at school,
maybe with some extra salacious details, and then turn them
into a book. At some points, Collette also said this
whole thing was her idea, and that at first Willie
(14:05):
was dismissive of it. Whoever's idea it was. She did
ultimately write a book, although Willie didn't do anything with
it at first, but he circled back to it a
few years later, and the result was Collette's first book,
Claudine alecl or Claudine at School, which was published in
nineteen hundred. This is a coming of age story about
(14:25):
fifteen year old Claudine in her last year at a
village day school. Written in the form of a diary.
There is a love triangle involving Claudine and the headmistress's
young assistant Amy, and the school's much older headmistress herself.
Sometimes this is described as one of the first y
A novels, and Claudine is sometimes called the first teenage protagonist.
(14:49):
Of course, there have always been people between the ages
of thirteen and nineteen, but the idea that teenagers were
a particular group with common aspects to their personalities development
had not really been established yet. And Claudine has a
lot of the traits that are often associated with teenagers today,
including being impulsive, brash, rebellious, and sexually curious. And Collette
(15:14):
definitely saw herself in this character and wrote to a friend, quote,
I have discovered an astonishing young girl. Do you know
who she is? She is exactly me before my marriage.
This isn't generally regarded as Collette's greatest book, but its
first lines give kind of a glimpse into how her
writing could be really evocative, sometimes without using a lot
(15:36):
of words translated into English, they read quote, my name
is Claudine. I live in Montoni. I was born there
in four I shall probably not die there. Collette had
already published some articles under her own name, but Claudine
at School came out with Willie listed as its author.
Most write ups and biopics frame this as Willie stealing
(15:58):
credit for Colette's work with out her consent, but she
also described this as a mutual decision motivated in part
by concerns that if this tid leading book was published
under her name, it could damage the reputation of her
half brother, who had just married the daughter of a viscount. Yeah,
that half brother also had the lingering suspicion of who
(16:19):
his father had been, So it was like, and then also,
if he turns out to have a scandalous sister, how's
that going to go. Regardless of whose decision this was
or what exactly motivated it, though really definitely exploited Colette's
work as a writer. At first, Claudine at School didn't
sell very well, but that changed after he got some
(16:40):
prominent friends to write favorable reviews of it. Then it
became a bestseller, in the first in a series, with
many of Claudine's adventures mirroring parts of Colette's own life.
For those of the people around her, Claudine also became
something of a brand. They were Claudine perfumes and Claudine soaps,
and Claudeing cigars, Clauding collars for clothing, on and on.
(17:05):
But Colette got none of the money for this. It
all went to Willie, even as the fact that Colette
had really written these books became sort of an open secret.
Realie only started giving her a regular allowance after one
of the Claudine books was made into a play, which
turned the franchise into an even bigger money maker. He
also bought her a manner in the country known as
(17:27):
Lement Boucon. He would also walk around with Colette on
one arm and Polaire, who portrayed Claudine in the play,
on the other, calling the two women his twins. There
are also a lot of descriptions of Walie pushing Colette
to crank out more and more writing, even to the
point of locking her in her room when she wasn't
(17:48):
being productive enough. Even though this does show up in
her fiction, Colette herself described being locked in her room
only at the country house, and at her own request,
because she was having trouble forcussing there. As the Claudine
series was being published, Colette was also making changes to
her life. When she was about thirty, she cut her
(18:09):
hair short, much to the shock and dismay of some
of her family. She started wearing clothing that was more androgynous.
She worked out using exercise equipment, first installed in their
Paris apartment and then at lemn Boucon. Today, it probably
wouldn't strike people as all that unusual for someone to
routinely work out in a home gym if they had
(18:29):
the money in the space for one. But at the
time the exercises she did as part of her routine
were done almost exclusively by athletes, not by regular folks
just trying to change the shape of their bodies. And
Colette also started having affairs of her own, something that
we Lely knew about and even seemed to encourage, as
well as encouraging her to incorporate those affairs into her writing.
(18:53):
These relationships were with other women. Collette thought Wally found
this unthreatening in a way that he really would if
she were seeing another man. At one point, Walie and
Colette were both having an affair with a woman named
Jersey Raoul Duval, although Collette did not know at first
that really was also involved with her. Eventually Collette found out,
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and so did Georgie's husband, who tried to buy and
destroy the entire stock of the book that Colette wrote
about this. Really still owned the copyright to that book, though,
which was published in English as Claudine married, so he
just took it to another publisher had it done over
just after the third Claudine book came out, Collette had
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a brief relationship with Natalie Clifford Barney, an American writer
who had moved to Paris and hosted a woman only salon.
Many of its attendees were lesbian or bisexual, including past
podcast subjects Gertrude Stein and Marie Laurence Some. Barney herself
was famously openly lesbian at a time when homosexuality was
(19:59):
heavily stigmatized. She and Colette were still friends after their
romantic relationship ended, and Collette was part of this circle
for most of the rest of her life. I feel
like every time Natalie Barney comes up on the show,
it's like the probably she should be here. She's like
a historical nexus point because a lot of people's stories
(20:20):
passed through her salon, for sure. As Colette was writing
the later Claudine books, she was also starting to think
about leaving her husband. He influenced her as a writer
in a lot of ways. It also is clear he
was not great to her as a spouse and partner.
She published Dialogue, Debit or Creature Conversations under the name
(20:44):
Colette Really in nineteen four, and for the first time
the money from the book's sale went to her rather
than to her husband. This is a book of Colette's
own thoughts, as told through a series of conversations between
a cat and a dog. Knowing that she would also
need some other source of income, she started taking dance
lessons with the help of a friend, actor and mime
(21:06):
George Wegg, with the intent of starting a career on stage.
The following year, Collette and Willie started a separacion debien,
or a legal division of their property, although this wasn't
really connected to their relationship as husband and wife. Even
though Collette had made her husband a lot of money
(21:27):
through her books and the plays that were adapted from them,
he was just terrible at managing it, and he spent
money lavishly. She was in debt as well, but not
to the same extent, and this separation meant that neither
of them could be held responsible for the other's debts,
and that Willie could funnel royalties through Collette to protect
(21:47):
them from debt collectors. Also in nineteen o five, Collette
met Missy de Morney, whose father was the Duke of
Morney and whose uncle was Napoleon the Third. Missy was
also known as uncle Max and used Yussum, which is
Missy spelled backward, as a stage name. We'll get into
their relationship after a sponsor break. Missy de Morny was
(22:18):
a famous or maybe infamous figure around Paris in the
early twentieth century. Missy had been married to Jacques Godar,
the sixth Marquis de Bouff, from eighteen eighty one to
nine o three. Some accounts described Goddar as gay and
suggest that this marriage was mostly meant as kind of
a cover for him. I was really not able to
(22:40):
find much information about him at all, though, and some
of the details about their marriage that were in other
sources kind of seemed to contradict that idea. Some things
aren't totally clear about Missy either. Some of this infamy
came from the fact that Missy wore suits and trousers
and had short hair and a masculine demeanor. It was
(23:02):
illegal for anyone but men to wear pants, so Missy
was only able to get away with this thanks to
a combination of wealth and status. Some people today interpret
Missy as a transman and use he him pronouns for them,
and others interpret as a lesbian who liked to cross
dress or defy gender norms. Collette seems to have used
(23:24):
feminine forms of address in her letters to Missy, but
also used Missy as an inspiration for both male and
female characters. I really wish I had more information about Missy.
I only know of one full book length biography that's
in French, out of print and more than twenty years old.
(23:46):
So even if I had it and could read French
well enough to read it, which I really don't think
that I can, a lot has changed about how we
think and talk about gender since that book was published.
So while I can say just really confidently that Missy
is part of the umbrella of lgbt Q and specifically
trans history, I'm just less confident about things like which
(24:09):
ones are the right pronouns to use. Normally we default
to what people used for themselves, but I just I
don't know from my research what that really was. Yeah,
we don't. We don't have a diary of miss Ease,
right not. I mean, if they're if one exists, is
not something that I was able to get. Colette and
Missy met about a month before Colette and Willie started
(24:32):
that legal separation of their property. But Colette and Willie
were still living together, and they continued living together for
some time. At one point they all went on a vacation,
with Colette and Missy staying in one house and Willie
and his new love interest, Meg Villar's staying next door.
During this period, when their lives were overlapping, Missy wrote
(24:53):
Willie a letter describing thirty three year old Colette as
quote an impulsive child without any more feeling. Colette and
Missy's relationship with scandalous and started in nineteen o six.
Collette added another scandal by performing as a mime at
two different theaters. For women, acting was seen as comparable
(25:13):
to sex work, and mime was seen as a particularly
low brow form of theater, so Collette's choice not only
to go on stage, but also specifically to become a
mime raised a lot of eyebrows, and some of her
performances were particularly scandalous. On January three, seven, Collette and
(25:35):
Missy performed in a pantomime called revde Jeeped at the
Mulin Rouge, which Missy had co written. In it, Missy
played an archaeologist who opened a sarcophagus which a scantily
dressed Colette emerged from performing a provocative dance before the
two of them passionately kissed. A lot of descriptions of
(25:56):
this event make it sound like a riot, just spontaneous
Lee broke out as some in the audience applauded this
kiss and others jeered and threw things at the stage. Really,
though the Moulin Rouge had promoted this pantomime with the
Dourney name attached, and Missy's brother and ex husband and
many of their friends had all come up to the
(26:18):
theater already outraged, they were trying to disrupt the performance
as soon as it started. As Missy and Colette resolutely
carried on. Weallye and his future second wife were there
as well, and members of the audience turned on them.
Although Colette and Missy's relationship lasted until about nineteen twelve,
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the scandal surrounding this pantomime made it much harder for
the two of them to be seen together in public.
Missy even commissioned a pair of trousers with a detachable
skirt to try to avoid being harassed while out in public.
Colette's next book, La Retreat Sentimental or Retreat from Love,
was published under the name Colette Whelie in nineteen o seven,
(27:00):
and it was clearly influenced by the gradual end of
her relationship with Walie, maybe with some wish fulfillment thrown
in there. It features two of the characters from the
Claudine books, those air Claudine and Annie, living in a
house that was clearly modeled after one that Colette had
lived in with. Really, this is the last Claudine book,
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and in it, Claudine's husband get sick and dies. As
all of this was happening, Willie sold the copyright to
the Claudine books that had been published under his name,
without talking to Colette about it or even telling her
after the deal was done. She didn't discover this until
nine nine, and she was understandably outraged. By that time,
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they had been through the final stages of their divorce,
which they carried out in a very public and drama
filled way, full of lawsuits and counter suits and published correspondence,
and Colette accusing Willie of having murdered German Serva using
morphine stolen from her mother. During all of this, Colette's
mother told her that the only person she could count
(28:05):
on in the world was herself. I kind of feel
like I'm not sure, Collette could necessarily have even counted
on herself with some of the goings on During this
whole period, Colette and Missy moved into a duplex, each
with their own apartments, and they talked to a lawyer
about naming one another in their wills. They eventually bought
(28:29):
a villa in Brittany known as Rosbin, which they put
in Colette's name, and Missy started refurbishing it. By the
time Missy was finished, though their relationship was essentially over,
Collett's relationship with Missy was already becoming strained. When they
bought that villa, Collette had caught the attention of a
wealthy young man named Auguste Rio, and both august and
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Missy were jealous of one another, and yet Missy so
badly wanted to stay with Collette that agost was allowed
to accompany her to Roseven. This became an even bigger
tangle when Colette became interested in Ari de Journelle, who
was a baron and a high profile political journalist at
(29:12):
the publication Lament, where Colette had gotten a contract as
a regular columnist. Also, in addition to not exactly being
her boss, but being one of the people in charge
of the publication she was working for. Ari was married,
and one of his former lovers was so outraged by
his relationship with Colette that she threatened Colette's life over it.
(29:33):
Collette moved in with Ari in nineteen eleven, and her
relationships with Missy and August ultimately ended. In nine, Colette's
mother died. As we said earlier, Collette had really idolized Sidonie,
but she didn't go to the funeral. She was performing
in a play called The Night Bird, and she continued
on with her scheduled performances. This was not the only
(29:56):
time Colette missed a funeral. She hated death, and the
funerals that she attended were rare exceptions. Not long after this,
Colette became pregnant, something that she described as an accident
and kept secret for as long as she could. Ari's
wife agreed to a divorce under the idea that that's
what would be best for this child, and Colette and
(30:17):
Alrea got married on December eighteenth, nineteen twelve. Their daughter,
Colette renee to Juvenelle, was born on July third, nt
Colette called her daughter Belle Gazoo and made her a
character in some of her work, including in La Peche
le Bete, which came out in nineteen sixteen, and she
sometimes wrote about her daughter with a lot of love.
(30:40):
But Colette didn't have much of a relationship with her
daughter at all. She described herself as not having much
in the way of maternal feeling after giving birth, and
Colette Renee was raised mostly by nanny's and friends before
being sent to boarding school. Often she saw her mother
only once or twice a year. In addition to not
(31:01):
liking death, I don't know that anybody really likes death,
but Collette seems to have particularly tried to avoid it.
As we said earlier, Collette did not like the idea
of aging and tried to fight it. She worried that
pregnancy and giving birth would ruin the body that she
had tried to sculp through her exercise routine, and also
change it in a way that would mess up her
(31:22):
sex life. She was very relieved when afterward her body
seemed to repair itself, as she told a friend, almost
by magic. Collette's relationship with her husband took a turn
not long after their daughter was born, and we're going
to get into that in a whole lot more next time.
Before now, Tracy, do you have listener mail? I I
(31:45):
do this listener mail goes back to our episodes on
Irving Berlin and we had talked about how in the
early days of audio recording, a lot of recordings had
to be record did one at a time until better
mass production techniques came out, And so we got a
note from Daniel who uh the subject line of this
(32:10):
email as one performance yielded many hundred cylinders, and the
body of the email goes on to say they had
to perform the song repeatedly, but it wasn't as bad
as you thought. You weren't buying an individual solo performance
on every cylinder. First, they would arrange as many recording
phonographs as possible around the performer, so they could record
as many first generation originals as possible around ten or
(32:32):
so more for louder performances like bands. Second very early
on they developed a system called pantographic reproduction, which could
make up to a hundred copies of each original. In principle,
it was similar to playing it back on one phonograph
while recording the playback on others. Obviously, the system put
a premium on loudness, so performers sang at the top
(32:55):
of their lungs, bands and orchestras, you specially designed extra
loud inst months like the stroll violin. None of this
did anything for sound quality. Popular songs did require the
artists to perform over and over and over again, but
it wasn't one on one. Each performance could create many
hundreds of cylinders. Since the original set of recordings were
(33:15):
made from phonographs at different locations in the room, some
picked up more sound from the right, some from the left,
and people have been able to identify matching recordings made
from different positions in the same session and combine them
to produce stereo sound, although the results I've heard were
hardly worth the effort. Even from the beginning, one of
(33:36):
the big advantages of discs was it was easy to
use a molding process to make copies of discs, but
by processes for molding cylinders had been developed. UM, thank
you so much for that email, Daniel, and that information
that does add a lot more specifics to what he
had we had described in terms of how these things
(34:00):
were recorded and the idea that you were, UM, like
singing as loud as possible to a room full of
recording devices, I can definitely imagine, uh that might not
that might not necessarily lead to a performance that had
as much subtlety as today's recordings can high fidelity. I
(34:22):
mean also just in general, any time that I need
to listen, sometimes when we're working on something that's related
to music, I will try to find like old recordings
of the performer, and a lot of them are really
hard to listen to just because of the quality of
the cord recording itself, not just the relative loudness that
the performer was having to use to make the recording.
(34:45):
So anyway, if you would like to send us a
note or at history podcast that I heart radio dot
com and we're also all over social media and missed
in History, where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, in Instagram,
and you can subscribe to our show on the I
heart Radio app or wherever else you'd like to get
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(35:09):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It's been
a few years since we had some kind of love
story leading up to Valentine's to Day. I know this
(00:23):
is coming out a little earlier than Valentine's Day. We
had a little schedule switchery, but I felt like doing
some kind of love story something this year, and I
chose French author Collette. Love, passion and desire and pleasure
all running themes and her work and in her life,
(00:43):
and that life was seen as really scandalous and even notorious,
especially in her younger years. Uh. This this turned out
to have a lot more mess than I knew. There
was gonna be some mess, but there was more more
mess than I really was expecting by the time of
her death. Though Collette was regarded as a national icon
in France, they could be really tricky to sort out
(01:07):
some of the details, though, because she intentionally incorporated her
life into her fiction, to the point that there's some
widely repeated tidbits that are found in her books but
really contradict things that she actually told people about her life.
And while her writing really suggested that people, especially women,
(01:29):
should just be free to live their lives as their
very full, authentic selves, she also had a curated persona,
so maybe having that persona was her unique self. It's
hard to tell sometimes though, like was this her true
feeling or was this the public self she was presenting
to people. While I was working on this, I alternately
(01:52):
found things that made me go, wow, you were amazing
and I love you, Collette, and then other parts that
made me go, wow, you are horrible. Some of the
things that really scandalized French society during Collette's lifetime are
commonplace and even mostly accepted today, but parts of it
are more troubling now than they were then. So during
(02:14):
this two parter, we're gonna be talking about some relationships
that may have been eyebrow raising at the time, but
they weren't necessarily criminal today, though if we were talking
about the same relationships, we would probably be describing them
more as sexual abuse or rape than as a relationship.
So Collette was born Sidney Gabriel Collette on January eighteen
(02:36):
seventy three in Saint Severan Puis, which is in the
Burgundy region of France. If Burgundy is conjuring up images
of wine and beautiful vineyards, that is not what this
part of Burgundy was like. It was nicknamed the Poor
Burgundy because it was mostly home to woods, ravines, and
impoverished farms. Her father was Jules Colette, who had been
(02:58):
an officer and one of the French light infantry regiments
known as the Zuave, which included a lot of soldiers
from northern Africa. One of his legs had been amputated
after he was struck by a cannonball during the Wars
of Italian Independence, and he had been awarded the Quadi
Ger and also granted a post as a tax inspector.
(03:19):
Colette's mother, Sidony, was descended in part from a slaveholding
family who lived in the French colony of Martinique. She
had some African ancestry through her grandfather, Robert Landois. Colette
knew about her ancestry, and some sources describe it as
a source of pride for her, but surviving letters really
don't come across that way, both in her descriptions of
(03:42):
how she imagined her ancestors in the Caribbean and at
one point her description of it in a letter as quote,
a stain of black in my blood. Colette's mother, Sidney,
was already married when she met Jules Colette, and it
was rumored that her second child was father by Jules
rather than by her husband. Jules and Sydney got married
(04:05):
eleven months after her first husband's unexpected death. Jules and
Sydney then had two children together. The second of those
children was Collette, so she was the youngest of a
sibling and two other half siblings. Her family called her Gabrie,
and one of her mother's pet names for her translated
to golden sunshine. Before Colette was born, her family had
(04:28):
been pretty well off, especially compared to most of the
other people where they were living. Sidney and her older
two children had inherited a significant amount of money and
property from her late first husband, but Sidny and Jules
did not manage that fortune very well. A lot of
their wealth was in land that Jules really didn't know
(04:48):
how to manage, and he seems to have made some
pretty bad investments into things like farm equipment that really
didn't return a profit. Sidny and Jules also both liked
luxury and had some very expensive tastes and hobbies, and
they taught their children to appreciate things like food and wine.
Jules also had a love of science that led him
(05:09):
to buying lots of intricate instruments. Collette's childhood seems to
have been mostly happy, though Sidney was an avid gardener.
Collette described her mother as truly coming alive in the garden.
She taught her children to love nature and plants. They
had lots of pets, and Collette always really really loved
(05:30):
and had a deep affinity for animals. There was also
a library that the children could access without a lot
of restrictions. There were only a few books in there
that they were not allowed to read. Collette stressed that
she was not a bookish child, though she loved to
be outdoors. She loved to be in the garden and
in the woods. The families dwindling income eventually affected Colette
(05:52):
and her siblings, though, when her half sister Juliet married
a doctor in eighteen eighty five, Jules had to borrow
money for her dowry, something that he should have been
able to do out of Juliet's inheritance from her father,
and this led to a whole bunch of suspicion on
the part of Juliet's new in laws, who wanted to
basically audit the Collette family's finances. Collette attended a local
(06:17):
public school, and once she was old enough to go
to a boarding school as her siblings had done, there
just wasn't enough money to send her, and also her
mother really didn't want to part with her. The family's
lack of funds also made it unlikely that they could
find a suitable husband for Collette, and marriage was the
(06:37):
expected and really only acceptable path for a young woman
of her class. This was really one of the many
contradictions in Colette's life. In a lot of ways, Sudany
was unconventional and really ahead of her time. She was
an atheist and raised her children to believe that they
were special, and she really didn't expect them to conform
(06:58):
to the Catholic social standards of the community they were
living in. She absolutely, though, expected them to get married
and have families. Colette's parents had been selling off their
farmland to cover expenses and debts, and as she entered
her teens, the land and the money were almost entirely gone.
They were living almost exclusively on a pension Jules had
(07:21):
earned with his military service and with his family's lifestyle,
that just wasn't enough. Eventually they had to move in
with Colette's half brother, who had become a doctor. So
when Colette started showing an obvious attraction to one of
the family's social connections, her parents were relieved, in spite
of this man's reputation as a philanderer and the huge
(07:43):
gap in their ages. This man was Alre Galtier Villar,
also known as Vali, who was a journalist in a
music critic. They met in eight nine, when Colette was
sixteen and really was thirty. Colette was immediately infatuated, but
we did not return her affections. At first, he was
involved with a married woman named jermin Serva. Willie described
(08:07):
German as his first great love. Eventually, Willie and Germaine
had a son together named Jacques, at which point her
husband divorced her, and then Willie legally recognized his child. Um.
I will note that I've heard people pronounce his name
as the English name Willie, and then also as like
more of a French vally. Sort of depends on who's talking.
(08:30):
I think his relationship with Colette, though, seems to have
started after Germaine died suddenly in At that point, Jacques
was only two. He asked Colette's parents to help him
find a wet nurse, and then Colette was sometimes called
on so basically babysit this little boy. There are some
(08:51):
things that are really unclear about Wally's relationship with Colette.
As we said earlier, to her family, it was a
huge relief because she didn't really have any other prospects
for a marriage. But his family was a different story.
They saw Colette's lack of dowry and her family's financial
situation as a problem. While Collette was deeply in love
(09:14):
with Willie, his letters from this period don't really suggest
that he felt the same way. He was really grief
stricken over Germaine's death. It's possible that there was some
kind of bigger scandal lurking that he was hoping to
avoid by marrying Colette. According to her third husband's second
(09:35):
wife much later in her life, Colette told him that
Wally had raped her before their marriage, But various correspondence
about these marriage arrangements really don't suggest that something like
that was like motivating her parents into essentially blackmailing him
into marrying her, but Willie and Colette were married on
(09:55):
May fifte when she was twenty and he was third five.
The couple moved to Paris, and Willie sent Jacques to
be raised by a grandmother. After the wedding, Willie's family
cut him out of his position in the family publishing
business and reduced his income Outside of her fiction, Collette
(10:16):
didn't leave a lot of documentation about the first year
of their marriage. She wrote letters to her mother, but
those letters were destroyed after her mother's death. In later years, though,
she said this was one of the most unhappy periods
of her life and we will talk about it more
after a sponsor break. In a lot of ways, Collette
(10:44):
didn't conform to what was expected of girls and young
women at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in
the area where she grew up. She had started going
only by Colette while still in school, like a lot
of boys called each other only by their last name Aims.
She had encouraged her school friends to start doing the same.
She had idolized her unconventional mother and had been a
(11:08):
lot more interested in rambling in the outdoors than learning
all the domestic skills involved with keeping a home. She
was lively and curious and personable, but she wasn't seen
as particularly feminine. But when she arrived in Paris with Willie,
she didn't really fit in there either. She dressed and
acted like someone from the country. She wore her hair
(11:29):
in two very, very long braids, and while a lot
of people commented on how beautiful her hair was, this
style also made her look like a little girl, and
this was kind of a theme in Collette's life. She
did not want to get old, and she did everything
that she could to put off aging. But she also
seems to have intentionally made herself look even younger than
(11:51):
she was during her relationship with Willie, because she knew
he liked younger women, and she was constantly out in
public among people whose habits and Moray's were not at all,
which she was used to. Since Wally was a theater critic,
he was expected to go to pretty much every performance
and cultural event that there was. She was expected to
(12:13):
go with him a lot of the time, and at
the same time, he was very controlling of her. He
was stingy with his money. He refused to give Collette
an allowance that she might have used to like update
her style and wardrobe to more fit in with the society.
He would buy things for her to wear, but not
necessarily things that she liked. It all, she started to
(12:33):
make friends, but she still felt really lonely. Then, in
eighteen ninety four, Collette got an anonymous letter, and this
letter told her where she could go if she wanted
to catch her husband with another woman. She went, and
she did catch him, and she was devastated. Soon after this,
she became seriously ill and it took her months to recover.
(12:57):
Some accounts interpret this illness as a psycho logical breakdown,
but others describe something that involved more of a lingering fever.
Although really had his byline on a lot of writing,
a lot of that writing had been done by other people.
Sometimes he's described as having an army of ghost writers
or running a ghostwriting factory. Some of his writers were
(13:19):
at the start of their careers. Others were a lot
more prominent and just needed the money. He was really
good at marketing and especially self promotion, and that meant
that somebody writing stuff that he was taking credit for
could potentially make a lot of money doing so so.
For some people that felt worth it even though they
weren't actually getting credit for their own work. In he
(13:43):
started using that army of ghost writers to turn out fiction.
Most accounts say that really suggested that Collette write down
the story she had been telling about her days at school,
maybe with some extra salacious details, and then turn them
into a book. At some points, Collette also said this
whole thing was her idea, and that at first Willie
(14:05):
was dismissive of it. Whoever's idea it was. She did
ultimately write a book, although Willie didn't do anything with
it at first, but he circled back to it a
few years later, and the result was Collette's first book,
Claudine alecl or Claudine at School, which was published in
nineteen hundred. This is a coming of age story about
(14:25):
fifteen year old Claudine in her last year at a
village day school. Written in the form of a diary.
There is a love triangle involving Claudine and the headmistress's
young assistant Amy, and the school's much older headmistress herself.
Sometimes this is described as one of the first y
A novels, and Claudine is sometimes called the first teenage protagonist.
(14:49):
Of course, there have always been people between the ages
of thirteen and nineteen, but the idea that teenagers were
a particular group with common aspects to their personalities development
had not really been established yet. And Claudine has a
lot of the traits that are often associated with teenagers today,
including being impulsive, brash, rebellious, and sexually curious. And Collette
(15:14):
definitely saw herself in this character and wrote to a friend, quote,
I have discovered an astonishing young girl. Do you know
who she is? She is exactly me before my marriage.
This isn't generally regarded as Collette's greatest book, but its
first lines give kind of a glimpse into how her
writing could be really evocative, sometimes without using a lot
(15:36):
of words translated into English, they read quote, my name
is Claudine. I live in Montoni. I was born there
in four I shall probably not die there. Collette had
already published some articles under her own name, but Claudine
at School came out with Willie listed as its author.
Most write ups and biopics frame this as Willie stealing
(15:58):
credit for Colette's work with out her consent, but she
also described this as a mutual decision motivated in part
by concerns that if this tid leading book was published
under her name, it could damage the reputation of her
half brother, who had just married the daughter of a viscount. Yeah,
that half brother also had the lingering suspicion of who
(16:19):
his father had been, So it was like, and then also,
if he turns out to have a scandalous sister, how's
that going to go. Regardless of whose decision this was
or what exactly motivated it, though really definitely exploited Colette's
work as a writer. At first, Claudine at School didn't
sell very well, but that changed after he got some
(16:40):
prominent friends to write favorable reviews of it. Then it
became a bestseller, in the first in a series, with
many of Claudine's adventures mirroring parts of Colette's own life.
For those of the people around her, Claudine also became
something of a brand. They were Claudine perfumes and Claudine soaps,
and Claudeing cigars, Clauding collars for clothing, on and on.
(17:05):
But Colette got none of the money for this. It
all went to Willie, even as the fact that Colette
had really written these books became sort of an open secret.
Realie only started giving her a regular allowance after one
of the Claudine books was made into a play, which
turned the franchise into an even bigger money maker. He
also bought her a manner in the country known as
(17:27):
Lement Boucon. He would also walk around with Colette on
one arm and Polaire, who portrayed Claudine in the play,
on the other, calling the two women his twins. There
are also a lot of descriptions of Walie pushing Colette
to crank out more and more writing, even to the
point of locking her in her room when she wasn't
(17:48):
being productive enough. Even though this does show up in
her fiction, Colette herself described being locked in her room
only at the country house, and at her own request,
because she was having trouble forcussing there. As the Claudine
series was being published, Colette was also making changes to
her life. When she was about thirty, she cut her
(18:09):
hair short, much to the shock and dismay of some
of her family. She started wearing clothing that was more androgynous.
She worked out using exercise equipment, first installed in their
Paris apartment and then at lemn Boucon. Today, it probably
wouldn't strike people as all that unusual for someone to
routinely work out in a home gym if they had
(18:29):
the money in the space for one. But at the
time the exercises she did as part of her routine
were done almost exclusively by athletes, not by regular folks
just trying to change the shape of their bodies. And
Colette also started having affairs of her own, something that
we Lely knew about and even seemed to encourage, as
well as encouraging her to incorporate those affairs into her writing.
(18:53):
These relationships were with other women. Collette thought Wally found
this unthreatening in a way that he really would if
she were seeing another man. At one point, Walie and
Colette were both having an affair with a woman named
Jersey Raoul Duval, although Collette did not know at first
that really was also involved with her. Eventually Collette found out,
(19:16):
and so did Georgie's husband, who tried to buy and
destroy the entire stock of the book that Colette wrote
about this. Really still owned the copyright to that book, though,
which was published in English as Claudine married, so he
just took it to another publisher had it done over
just after the third Claudine book came out, Collette had
(19:37):
a brief relationship with Natalie Clifford Barney, an American writer
who had moved to Paris and hosted a woman only salon.
Many of its attendees were lesbian or bisexual, including past
podcast subjects Gertrude Stein and Marie Laurence Some. Barney herself
was famously openly lesbian at a time when homosexuality was
(19:59):
heavily stigmatized. She and Colette were still friends after their
romantic relationship ended, and Collette was part of this circle
for most of the rest of her life. I feel
like every time Natalie Barney comes up on the show,
it's like the probably she should be here. She's like
a historical nexus point because a lot of people's stories
(20:20):
passed through her salon, for sure. As Colette was writing
the later Claudine books, she was also starting to think
about leaving her husband. He influenced her as a writer
in a lot of ways. It also is clear he
was not great to her as a spouse and partner.
She published Dialogue, Debit or Creature Conversations under the name
(20:44):
Colette Really in nineteen four, and for the first time
the money from the book's sale went to her rather
than to her husband. This is a book of Colette's
own thoughts, as told through a series of conversations between
a cat and a dog. Knowing that she would also
need some other source of income, she started taking dance
lessons with the help of a friend, actor and mime
(21:06):
George Wegg, with the intent of starting a career on stage.
The following year, Collette and Willie started a separacion debien,
or a legal division of their property, although this wasn't
really connected to their relationship as husband and wife. Even
though Collette had made her husband a lot of money
(21:27):
through her books and the plays that were adapted from them,
he was just terrible at managing it, and he spent
money lavishly. She was in debt as well, but not
to the same extent, and this separation meant that neither
of them could be held responsible for the other's debts,
and that Willie could funnel royalties through Collette to protect
(21:47):
them from debt collectors. Also in nineteen o five, Collette
met Missy de Morney, whose father was the Duke of
Morney and whose uncle was Napoleon the Third. Missy was
also known as uncle Max and used Yussum, which is
Missy spelled backward, as a stage name. We'll get into
their relationship after a sponsor break. Missy de Morny was
(22:18):
a famous or maybe infamous figure around Paris in the
early twentieth century. Missy had been married to Jacques Godar,
the sixth Marquis de Bouff, from eighteen eighty one to
nine o three. Some accounts described Goddar as gay and
suggest that this marriage was mostly meant as kind of
a cover for him. I was really not able to
(22:40):
find much information about him at all, though, and some
of the details about their marriage that were in other
sources kind of seemed to contradict that idea. Some things
aren't totally clear about Missy either. Some of this infamy
came from the fact that Missy wore suits and trousers
and had short hair and a masculine demeanor. It was
(23:02):
illegal for anyone but men to wear pants, so Missy
was only able to get away with this thanks to
a combination of wealth and status. Some people today interpret
Missy as a transman and use he him pronouns for them,
and others interpret as a lesbian who liked to cross
dress or defy gender norms. Collette seems to have used
(23:24):
feminine forms of address in her letters to Missy, but
also used Missy as an inspiration for both male and
female characters. I really wish I had more information about Missy.
I only know of one full book length biography that's
in French, out of print and more than twenty years old.
(23:46):
So even if I had it and could read French
well enough to read it, which I really don't think
that I can, a lot has changed about how we
think and talk about gender since that book was published.
So while I can say just really confidently that Missy
is part of the umbrella of lgbt Q and specifically
trans history, I'm just less confident about things like which
(24:09):
ones are the right pronouns to use. Normally we default
to what people used for themselves, but I just I
don't know from my research what that really was. Yeah,
we don't. We don't have a diary of miss Ease,
right not. I mean, if they're if one exists, is
not something that I was able to get. Colette and
Missy met about a month before Colette and Willie started
(24:32):
that legal separation of their property. But Colette and Willie
were still living together, and they continued living together for
some time. At one point they all went on a vacation,
with Colette and Missy staying in one house and Willie
and his new love interest, Meg Villar's staying next door.
During this period, when their lives were overlapping, Missy wrote
(24:53):
Willie a letter describing thirty three year old Colette as
quote an impulsive child without any more feeling. Colette and
Missy's relationship with scandalous and started in nineteen o six.
Collette added another scandal by performing as a mime at
two different theaters. For women, acting was seen as comparable
(25:13):
to sex work, and mime was seen as a particularly
low brow form of theater, so Collette's choice not only
to go on stage, but also specifically to become a
mime raised a lot of eyebrows, and some of her
performances were particularly scandalous. On January three, seven, Collette and
(25:35):
Missy performed in a pantomime called revde Jeeped at the
Mulin Rouge, which Missy had co written. In it, Missy
played an archaeologist who opened a sarcophagus which a scantily
dressed Colette emerged from performing a provocative dance before the
two of them passionately kissed. A lot of descriptions of
(25:56):
this event make it sound like a riot, just spontaneous
Lee broke out as some in the audience applauded this
kiss and others jeered and threw things at the stage. Really,
though the Moulin Rouge had promoted this pantomime with the
Dourney name attached, and Missy's brother and ex husband and
many of their friends had all come up to the
(26:18):
theater already outraged, they were trying to disrupt the performance
as soon as it started. As Missy and Colette resolutely
carried on. Weallye and his future second wife were there
as well, and members of the audience turned on them.
Although Colette and Missy's relationship lasted until about nineteen twelve,
(26:38):
the scandal surrounding this pantomime made it much harder for
the two of them to be seen together in public.
Missy even commissioned a pair of trousers with a detachable
skirt to try to avoid being harassed while out in public.
Colette's next book, La Retreat Sentimental or Retreat from Love,
was published under the name Colette Whelie in nineteen o seven,
(27:00):
and it was clearly influenced by the gradual end of
her relationship with Walie, maybe with some wish fulfillment thrown
in there. It features two of the characters from the
Claudine books, those air Claudine and Annie, living in a
house that was clearly modeled after one that Colette had
lived in with. Really, this is the last Claudine book,
(27:22):
and in it, Claudine's husband get sick and dies. As
all of this was happening, Willie sold the copyright to
the Claudine books that had been published under his name,
without talking to Colette about it or even telling her
after the deal was done. She didn't discover this until
nine nine, and she was understandably outraged. By that time,
(27:44):
they had been through the final stages of their divorce,
which they carried out in a very public and drama
filled way, full of lawsuits and counter suits and published correspondence,
and Colette accusing Willie of having murdered German Serva using
morphine stolen from her mother. During all of this, Colette's
mother told her that the only person she could count
(28:05):
on in the world was herself. I kind of feel
like I'm not sure, Collette could necessarily have even counted
on herself with some of the goings on During this
whole period, Colette and Missy moved into a duplex, each
with their own apartments, and they talked to a lawyer
about naming one another in their wills. They eventually bought
(28:29):
a villa in Brittany known as Rosbin, which they put
in Colette's name, and Missy started refurbishing it. By the
time Missy was finished, though their relationship was essentially over,
Collett's relationship with Missy was already becoming strained. When they
bought that villa, Collette had caught the attention of a
wealthy young man named Auguste Rio, and both august and
(28:52):
Missy were jealous of one another, and yet Missy so
badly wanted to stay with Collette that agost was allowed
to accompany her to Roseven. This became an even bigger
tangle when Colette became interested in Ari de Journelle, who
was a baron and a high profile political journalist at
(29:12):
the publication Lament, where Colette had gotten a contract as
a regular columnist. Also, in addition to not exactly being
her boss, but being one of the people in charge
of the publication she was working for. Ari was married,
and one of his former lovers was so outraged by
his relationship with Colette that she threatened Colette's life over it.
(29:33):
Collette moved in with Ari in nineteen eleven, and her
relationships with Missy and August ultimately ended. In nine, Colette's
mother died. As we said earlier, Collette had really idolized Sidonie,
but she didn't go to the funeral. She was performing
in a play called The Night Bird, and she continued
on with her scheduled performances. This was not the only
(29:56):
time Colette missed a funeral. She hated death, and the
funerals that she attended were rare exceptions. Not long after this,
Colette became pregnant, something that she described as an accident
and kept secret for as long as she could. Ari's
wife agreed to a divorce under the idea that that's
what would be best for this child, and Colette and
(30:17):
Alrea got married on December eighteenth, nineteen twelve. Their daughter,
Colette renee to Juvenelle, was born on July third, nt
Colette called her daughter Belle Gazoo and made her a
character in some of her work, including in La Peche
le Bete, which came out in nineteen sixteen, and she
sometimes wrote about her daughter with a lot of love.
(30:40):
But Colette didn't have much of a relationship with her
daughter at all. She described herself as not having much
in the way of maternal feeling after giving birth, and
Colette Renee was raised mostly by nanny's and friends before
being sent to boarding school. Often she saw her mother
only once or twice a year. In addition to not
(31:01):
liking death, I don't know that anybody really likes death,
but Collette seems to have particularly tried to avoid it.
As we said earlier, Collette did not like the idea
of aging and tried to fight it. She worried that
pregnancy and giving birth would ruin the body that she
had tried to sculp through her exercise routine, and also
change it in a way that would mess up her
(31:22):
sex life. She was very relieved when afterward her body
seemed to repair itself, as she told a friend, almost
by magic. Collette's relationship with her husband took a turn
not long after their daughter was born, and we're going
to get into that in a whole lot more next time.
Before now, Tracy, do you have listener mail? I I
(31:45):
do this listener mail goes back to our episodes on
Irving Berlin and we had talked about how in the
early days of audio recording, a lot of recordings had
to be record did one at a time until better
mass production techniques came out, And so we got a
note from Daniel who uh the subject line of this
(32:10):
email as one performance yielded many hundred cylinders, and the
body of the email goes on to say they had
to perform the song repeatedly, but it wasn't as bad
as you thought. You weren't buying an individual solo performance
on every cylinder. First, they would arrange as many recording
phonographs as possible around the performer, so they could record
as many first generation originals as possible around ten or
(32:32):
so more for louder performances like bands. Second very early
on they developed a system called pantographic reproduction, which could
make up to a hundred copies of each original. In principle,
it was similar to playing it back on one phonograph
while recording the playback on others. Obviously, the system put
a premium on loudness, so performers sang at the top
(32:55):
of their lungs, bands and orchestras, you specially designed extra
loud inst months like the stroll violin. None of this
did anything for sound quality. Popular songs did require the
artists to perform over and over and over again, but
it wasn't one on one. Each performance could create many
hundreds of cylinders. Since the original set of recordings were
(33:15):
made from phonographs at different locations in the room, some
picked up more sound from the right, some from the left,
and people have been able to identify matching recordings made
from different positions in the same session and combine them
to produce stereo sound, although the results I've heard were
hardly worth the effort. Even from the beginning, one of
(33:36):
the big advantages of discs was it was easy to
use a molding process to make copies of discs, but
by processes for molding cylinders had been developed. UM, thank
you so much for that email, Daniel, and that information
that does add a lot more specifics to what he
had we had described in terms of how these things
(34:00):
were recorded and the idea that you were, UM, like
singing as loud as possible to a room full of
recording devices, I can definitely imagine, uh that might not
that might not necessarily lead to a performance that had
as much subtlety as today's recordings can high fidelity. I
(34:22):
mean also just in general, any time that I need
to listen, sometimes when we're working on something that's related
to music, I will try to find like old recordings
of the performer, and a lot of them are really
hard to listen to just because of the quality of
the cord recording itself, not just the relative loudness that
the performer was having to use to make the recording.
(34:45):
So anyway, if you would like to send us a
note or at history podcast that I heart radio dot
com and we're also all over social media and missed
in History, where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, in Instagram,
and you can subscribe to our show on the I
heart Radio app or wherever else you'd like to get
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
(35:09):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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