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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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.