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 Frying. Today we have part two of our episode on French author Collette Love and Passion and pain and Loss. We're all ongoing themes and her writing. And her writing also played a lot with gender and sexuality, including lots of portrayals of women and their physical desires and their pursuits of fulfilling relationships. Most critics consider Collett's portrayals of women to be the most interesting and the most fully realized, sometimes with her portrayals of men being criticized as seeming weak or one dimensional. Part one of this two part episode is highly recommended before getting into this one because it covers the first forty years of Collett's life, include her marriage to Ari de Jouvenel. We're picking up during that marriage today heads up. Today's episode includes Collette's sexual relationship with her sixteen year old stepson, and we will also have some brief mentions of suicide. So, as we mentioned in Part one, Colette's second husband, Rie de Jouvenelle, was a wealthy baron and during their marriage, he was elected to represent the Department of Cores in the French Parliament. Colette was writing fiction as well as writing for Lamatta, where Henri was a political journalist and editor. In addition to her writing, Colette was called on to host various officials and dignitaries and to visit them as well. This was all a big shift from what her life had been like before this point. Prior to their marriage, Alri had a reputation as a womanizer, and sometime during Colette's pregnancy with their daughter, he started having an affair with an other woman. Collette found out and was once again devastated, and this might have led to a pretty speedy end for their relationship, But then World War One began and in August of nineteen fourteen, Ari was called into active service in the military. Collette made a very brief for a into volunteering as a night nurse before transferring to the day shift and then traveling under forged identification papers to join her husband. And when we say this for it was brief, it lasted about a week before she asked to move to the day shift and then set off a verdant Soon she was writing about what she saw there, becoming one of the first women in Europe to report from the front. Her work was published at Demetta that was the publication that her husband edited, and she published at other journals and newspapers as well. Then this work was published as a collection called The Long Hours after the war was over. She focused a lot of her wartime writing on how the war was affecting women and children. This wasn't a subject that many other reporters were really covering. But this work is also lyrical, more sentimental, and sometimes even romanticized, especially when compared to writers who were focused more on the war's horrific and violent aspects. In Secrets of the Flesh, a Life of Colette, biographer Judith Thurman writes, quote, there is not a single corpse in any of her dispatches. There is anxiety, but no despair, hunger but no starvation. Some of this is probably a byproduct of where Colette was and what she personally witnessed, but it's also one of the running themes of her life. She often did not directly comment on or seemed to notice political crises or major world events unless they personally affected her. For example, most of what we talked about in part one of this episode took place during the Drefist affair, which we covered on the show as a two parter in one, and that was something that divided French society, and we didn't mention it because Collette's surviving writing never even mentions it, and we don't really know what her opinions were on it, although we do know Weallye, who she was married to at the time, was anti Semitic and anti Drefussar. On the rare occasion that Collette did directly comment on things like politics, her opinions didn't really align with what a person might expect based on what we have talked about in her life so far, like she took dance lessons and started publishing her work under her own name in preparation to leave her husband, and all of that ran contrary to what was expected of women. She tried to make a life for herself under her own terms, and one of the themes of her writing is that women should be able to feel fulfilled, including having sexual fulfillment in their lives. But she didn't think of herself as a feminist or advocate for political equality regardless of sex. In nineteen ten, she told an interviewer that she thought suffragists were disgusting and said they deserved quote the whip and the harem. After the war was over, Alrid de Juvenna traveled to Geneva as part of France's delegation to the Disarmament Commission, and Collett's role expanded at Lamenta. In addition to working as a theater critic, she became literary editor, including deciding which works of fiction Lomentin should publish. She also turned her attention back to writing fiction herself, which she had not done much of during the war. The result was Cherie, published serially and then as a book in nineteen twenty. This is about an affair between a forty nine year old woman named Leah and a five year old man named Bread, known as Cherie. This follows their affair through to its necessary end, and the end of that affair leaves both of them heartbroken all the Collette originally envisioned this as a play. It became one of her best known novels, especially in France. That same year she was named Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor. After Colette had started publishing Cherry Alri's ex wife, Sarah, sent their son Bertran to try to convince Colette to persuade Enri to allow Sarah to keep using her married name. The de Juvenal name carried a lot of Prestigian influence, and Henri seems to have felt like Sarah was abusing that privilege and was annoyed about it. Bertran was sixteen, the same age that Colette had been when she met her first husband. Really, Collette seduced Bertran, and her behavior toward him, and her descriptions of all this are pretty manipulative and predatory. Bertron had a girlfriend his own age, Pamela, the sister of one of his school friends, when Colette, who was forty eight, started seducing him. This included giving him books from her library to read, and one of those books us Cherie about this affair between an older woman and a much younger man. She later said, quote, I invented Leah as a premonition. The biography we mentioned earlier described the Villa of rose Ven, where Colette spent her summers, as quote a hotbed of Chicovian drama. During this time, Collette also passed letters back and forth between Bertrand and Pamela and used their relationship as the basis for Leblon abb or The Ripening Seed, which came out in That was also the year that Ari found out what was going on, either Colette admitted it to him or he caught them together. He was outraged and left Colette immediately. Ari had numerous affairs during their marriage, but his wife sleeping with his teenage son was obviously something very different from that. Bertrand described himself as horrified to have been the cause of all this chaos and strife. Given aure's position at Lamadon, Colette had to stop working there after a few months. She went to work at one of the publication's rivals, Le Journal, and she and Bertramp continued to have a pretty public relationship in Paris. This, of course, led to a lot of scandal and gossip, more connected to the fact that Bertrand was Colette's husband's son than their respective ages. Eventually, Bertrand's engagement was announced to Marcel Pratt, and Colette was extremely jealous and kept trying to convince him to stay with her instead, but Bertrand's wedding went on as planned. In Collette published a sequel to Sari called The Last of Schari the following year. In its after Years Apart, Schari returns to Leah and finds her older and heavier, and he's no longer attracted to her. He takes his own life at the end of the book, which is one of a number of suice sides in Colette's writing. By the time this book was published, Colette had met someone else, Maurice Gudiquette, who was thirty five. He had long been a fan of her work, and at first he found her really intimidating, but their relationship would continue for the rest of her life. During that time, she would evolve from being thought of as a perpetual source of scandal, chaos, and controversial literature to a more mature and knowing woman whose long experience had given her perspective on things like love and loss, and also for having a deep love of fine things, including good food and wine, and taking joy in indulgence. She would eventually say of herself justue gourmet gourmand gluton or I am gourmet greedy gluttonius. We'll have more on her life. After a quick sponsor break before his death in nineteen twenty two, Marcel Proust had been widely regarded as France's greatest living writer. After that point, in a lot of people's opinion, France's greatest writer was Colette. As the nineteen twenties progressed, Colette decided to sell the villa of Roseven that she and Missy had purchased so that she could purchase another place near Central Bay. She continued to both write and act, including a touring production of Sherry with herself in the role of Leah. She published a series of stories about her childhood called My Mother's House in nineteen twenty two. In ninety eight, she was named an officer in the French Legion of Honor, and a year later she published Sido, which was a memoir of her mother's Sidonie, who had died in nineteen twelve. We talked about how much she admired and aspired to be like her mother, and a lot of people had pointed out that like it took a while before she returned to the idea of her mother and her writing. After her mother's death, Colette and Maurice struggled financially after the Great Depression started in Maurice had been a pearl merchant, and his business had already become a lot less profitable, in part because the fashion world was turning toward costume jewelry. He eventually gave up his pearl business and started selling things like used washing machines. Then, in nineteen thirty one, Colette broke her fibula. She developed ulcers around her cast, so doctors removed it much earlier than they normally would. Colette later developed arthritis, which was progressively disabling and painful, and Maurice believed this break and how it was treated were a factor. Colette tried many different treatments for this condition, including thermal baths, acupuncture, and during the nineteen forties X ray treatments, some of which caused burns on her stomach and legs. In ninety two, Colette published a Plezzier or These Pleasures, which would later be revised and republished as The Pure and the Impure. She later described this as the closest she would ever come to an autobiography, and included a lot of her thoughts on love and passion, especially in terms of same sex relationships. That included an account of the ladies of Longcotland, who we covered on the podcast back in that one made a return to people's feeds in as part of an episode or a pot sort of a playlist of all of our favorites. She also continued to appear on stage, including another portrayal of Leiah in a production of Sherry, although by this point she was visibly older than the character that she was portraying. She also opened a beauty institute in nineteen thirty two, where she made and sold perfumes and cosmetic treatments. She framed this as giving other women the power to enhance and preserve their beauty and stave off aging, and a lot of people thought the whole idea was way beneath the right or of such national stature. The institute only lasted for about a year, though it seems like she more or less just kind of lost interest in Collette and Maurice got married in a civil ceremony. They had been together for about a decade, and he was forty five and she was sixty two. Their decision to get married at this point was at least ostensibly a practical one, not necessarily a romantic one. They were planning a trip to New York and they'd heard that the hotels might not rent them a room together if they were not married. This relationship seems to have been happy, stable and loving. Maurice later said of it, quote, I set myself gently by the side of this woman whom life had so wounded, and I did so with the firm determination of proving to her that fidelity was not an empty word. Year by year she grew more persuaded of this, and her last books bear witness to a serenity that she would not otherwise have acquired. The year Collette and Maurice got married, Ari de Juvenell died, and the year after that Colette published My Apprenticeships, which is both the story of how she became a writer and a look at her relationship with her first husband, Arigotie Viler, also known as Really. He had died back in one This is pretty scathing and its treatment of him. Her reputation of a writer was continuing to grow. In ninety six, she was named Commander in the French Legion of Honor. By that point, Adolph Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany. The Nazi Party had been made Germany's only legal political party, and had passed discriminatory laws restricting virtually every aspect of Jewish people's lives and stripping them of German citizenship. Tensions were escalating in Europe and in Asia, and Italy had invaded Ethiopia, but as was the case with so many other major events, Collette didn't really seem to pay much attention to any of it. This was true even after Paris fell to the German army in nineteen forty, after which the French government moved to Vichy and began collaborating with the Nazi Party, And it was true even though Maurice Gutiquet was Jewish. But then on December seven, nineteen forty one, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the United States made its formal entry into World War Two. The French resistance increased its activities, and in response, Hitler issued what was known as the Night and Fog Decree, allowing German authorities to arrest people who were believed to be part of the resistance or otherwise in endangering German interests. The name night and Fog came from the idea that these arrests, which really were essentially kidnappings, would happen during the night, with people simply disappearing from site, they would be detained and they would be tried in secret courts. On December twelfth, ninety one, the Gestapo arrived at the Paris apartment in the Palais Royale, where Colette and Maurice were living. This is something neither of them seemed to have thought of as a possibility, and they were not at all prepared for it. Colette and their housekeeper were able to pack a small bag for Maurice before he was taken away. This was obviously terrifying for everyone, especially because both Colette and Maurice don't seem to have considered that something like this could happen. Collette said that for the rest of her life, her mouth would start trembling anytime someone unexpectedly arrived at her door. Maurice was held at a detention camp northeast of Paris. He later described this as a place where he was not given much to eat, and their betting was infested with vermin, but at least for fit and healthy people, things were manageable and the guards mostly left them alone. He managed to have notes to Collette smuggled out of the camp from time to time, most of them asking for things like food or books. Meanwhile, Colette tried to free him, calling in favors, talking to anybody she thought might be able to help. Eventually, on February six ninety two, he was freed on the order of Otto Abbott's, who was the German ambassador to vic France. He had married a French woman named Suzanne de Breiker in two She had convinced her husband to intervene on Collette's behalf. After Maurice's release from the camp, they remained in Paris. A couple of months later, they had tea with Susanne de Breiker at the German embassy. That June, the Nazis ordered Jewish people in France and a number of other countries to start wearing yellow stars. This is something that Colette described her husband as not particularly bothered by. It was only after Viscy authorities started deporting thousands of Jewish people from France and one of Colett's Jewish friends took her own life that they started to believe that Paris might be too dangerous. They went to centro Pe using forged papers. Eventually, Maurice made his way back to Paris and remained in hiding there. Collette made her way back as well, and they were both in Paris when it was liberated in August of n Shortly before the liberation of Paris, Missy dea Bouf, who we talked about in Part one, died by suicide sometime after the immediate aftermath of their breakup had subsided. Missy and Colette had gotten in contact again. They kept up a correspondence for most of the rest of their lives. Missy died at the age of eighty one, having outlived many close friends and also started to experience some cognitive decline. As was the case with much of what happened in the world during Colette's lifetime, she did not really comment on the events of World War two or speak out against the Nazi Party's violent anti semitism, even as it targeted her husband. We do not really know her thought process on this. Some scenarios are easy to imagine, like she may have understood that if she were publicly vocal on any of this, her husband's life would be at risk. But she's described as being a passive collaborationist during World War two, and she also published a lot of her work in pro visy anti Semitic journals. During the war, she also published a novel, Julie de Carnilon, which contained a lot of anti Semitic language. Even generously, this was not good, any of it. One of Collette's more well known novellas, especially in the United States, was one of the works she published in a pro VC journal during World War Two. This was Gig, which was published in This is the story of a girl in Paris whose grandmother and great aunt are training her to be a high class courtisan. Does not go exactly the way that those two women are planning for her. After the war was over, Collette chose Audrey Hepburn to play the role of Gigi on Broadway, and that launched hep Barn's career. She was also made into a musical film in and that film won all nine Academy Awards that it was nominated for. Collette did not live to see this version of her novella, though, and we're going to talk about that after we pause for a sponsor break. As we mentioned earlier, Collette developed arthritis and it worsened during World War Two. We've also talked about how Collette really hated the idea of aging, and in her younger years she had kept up a fitness regiment to both sculpt what her body looked like and to hopefully prevent physical problems later on in her life. Her body changed a lot as she got older, but she had really hoped that she was going to be active and physically well all the way until the end. So her disability and the chronic pain that accompanied it were just very, very upsetting to her. She tried to remain in good spirits, and if she thought she was sinking too far into despair, she would think about when the Gestapo came from Maurice. She thought that was the worst thing that could ever happen to her, and it had already happened. She spent most of the last years of her life in an apartment in Paris that overlooked the Palais Royal Gardens, an apartment that she described as quote another country home in Paris. Her bed was pushed against the window so she could see outside and sit in the fresh air when the weather was good. For a time, she was still able to travel, and she and Maurice would stay with friends or in hotels, or visit spas and thermal baths with the hope that she would get some pain relief. But the more trouble she had with her mobility, the less this was possible. This was an upstairs apartment, it was not accessible to her. Getting downstairs required her and her wheelchair to be carried. That was something that required two strong people to do. Maurice thought about moving them to a first floor apartment where this wouldn't be an issue, but worried that that kind of relocation would just be too upsetting for her, and then she would also no longer have the view of the gardens that she loved so much. After World War two, there had been a wave of effort in France to seek out and prosecute people who had collaborated with Germany. Many writers who had published in the pro Vichy press had their work boycotted, and some faced death threats and violence, but Collette's reputation was seemingly unaffected by her publishing in a range of pro Vissy journals during the war. On May second, she was elected to the French literary organization known as the Academy goncur. She was only the second woman to be so honored at mondegoncour who established the Academy, had specified in his will that it was not open to women or Jews. He also excluded poets and members of the Academy fonseai Is. In ninety Colette was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, although that prize went to T. S. Eliott. In nineteen fifty three, she was named Grand Officer in the French Legion of Honor. Colette died in Paris on August third, nineteen fifty four, at the age of eighty one. Maurice wrote an account of her death and which he said that as she was dying, she kept admonishing him to look. Look. He couldn't see what was so absorbing and so wondrous to her, and thought she must be seeing paradise. He later said of her quote. For thirty years she enabled me to live in a fairy world. It is often mentioned that Colette was denied Catholic funeral rites because of her divorces and remarriages, which is true, but she had not left any instructions for what should happen to her after her death, aside from the instruction that no one should see her. The request for a Catholic funeral had come from Maurice. Colette wasn't dead honored with a state funeral in France on August seventh, nineteen fifty four. She was buried at pearl Ches Cemetery. Maurice had become her literary executor. He later wrote a book about their life together called pret to Colette or Close to Collette. He later remarried and also became a father at the age of seventy one. He wrote a memoir about this, called The Delights of Growing Old, which was published in nineteen sixty six. He died on January nineteen seventy seven. Her daughter died in nineteen eighty one and was buried next to Collette at Parlaches. Collette was regarded as a national icon in France by the time of her death, and her work was widely read and deeply beloved. She wrote at least fifty books, along with plays and articles, and a ton of letters. She was a very avid correspondent. Although some of her books had been translated into other languages during her lifetime, she didn't become as widely known in many other parts of the world until later. In the UK and the US, her popularity didn't really take hold until the nineteen seventies thanks to a surging interest in women's literature. Will end with a quote from her work that, to me evokes both collette style of writing and how she viewed her own life and work. She published the short story Levrial de Vane, or The Tendrils of the Vine in Night. This was part of a collection of stories by the same name. She wrote it before her separation from Willie, in the early years of her career as a writer. It's framed as a legend that the nightingale didn't used to sing at night until he woke to find that he had become entangled in a fast growing vine. The nightingale feared that he would die, and so he swore to stay awake and sing for as long as the vine grew. While singing, he discovered his own voice and fell in love with it. Singing quote, I want to say say say everything. I know, everything, I think, everything, I guess everything which delights and hurt and astonishes me. That is called who. As I said at the beginning of part one, aren't of her life file Love and other parts? I'm like, no, that was that was bad girl. What do you have a listener mail for us? I do? This is from Cindy. Cindy wrote to us after we talked in our most recent Unearthed episodes about watermelon seeds and eating roasted watermelon seeds, and yes, Hi, Holly and Tracy, longtime fan of the show. I've never really been compelled to write, but when you mentioned trying roasted watermelon seeds, I just felt the need to act. Roasted in seasoned watermelon seeds her popular snack in China and a staple at gatherings. I would say they taste like a slightly sweeter sunflower seed. As much as I like eating them, though, I dreaded them being brought out at a party because it almost always meant that no matter when we said we were going to leave, and how late it got, the adults would chatter away for another hour or two, a pile of seed husks slowly growing between them on the table. As the oldest child in the family and among my parents friends, it just meant I had to sit among the toddlers a little longer. Still, though, it's one of my favorite snacks, and I think that if you like sunflower or pumpkin seeds, you should definitely give them a try. You can find the seeds at most local Chinese supermarkets, but I've included a link to a brand my family likes, as well as pictures of my cat and pup. My girlfriend and I adopted the kittie about five months ago and his name is Eggs Benedict. I love it, me do. He's the most active cat I've ever seen and loves to join us on hikes. The pup is Cedric, and I started listening to your show around the time when I adopted him about six years ago. I'm sure he would recognize your voices in a crowd. At this point, You've kept us company on many a long drive. Thanks for all you do, and please keep up the great work. Cindy. Cindy sent a picture of um they are They are soy sauce watermelons needs. Other folks had also let us know that if there are things that you can pick up at Chinese or other Asian supermarkets, and then of course animal pictures, which we always super super love. So thank you so much for letting me know that. About watermelon seeds, I don't know that they have ever caught my eye when I have been in one of the very out of our various local Asian groceries, So thank you. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcasts were at History Podcasts at i heart radio dot com. We're also on social media at missed in History and Let's Throw Find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, in Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app or wherever you 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 Frying. Today we have part two of our episode on French author Collette Love and Passion and pain and Loss. We're all ongoing themes and her writing. And her writing also played a lot with gender and sexuality, including lots of portrayals of women and their physical desires and their pursuits of fulfilling relationships. Most critics consider Collett's portrayals of women to be the most interesting and the most fully realized, sometimes with her portrayals of men being criticized as seeming weak or one dimensional. Part one of this two part episode is highly recommended before getting into this one because it covers the first forty years of Collett's life, include her marriage to Ari de Jouvenel. We're picking up during that marriage today heads up. Today's episode includes Collette's sexual relationship with her sixteen year old stepson, and we will also have some brief mentions of suicide. So, as we mentioned in Part one, Colette's second husband, Rie de Jouvenelle, was a wealthy baron and during their marriage, he was elected to represent the Department of Cores in the French Parliament. Colette was writing fiction as well as writing for Lamatta, where Henri was a political journalist and editor. In addition to her writing, Colette was called on to host various officials and dignitaries and to visit them as well. This was all a big shift from what her life had been like before this point. Prior to their marriage, Alri had a reputation as a womanizer, and sometime during Colette's pregnancy with their daughter, he started having an affair with an other woman. Collette found out and was once again devastated, and this might have led to a pretty speedy end for their relationship, But then World War One began and in August of nineteen fourteen, Ari was called into active service in the military. Collette made a very brief for a into volunteering as a night nurse before transferring to the day shift and then traveling under forged identification papers to join her husband. And when we say this for it was brief, it lasted about a week before she asked to move to the day shift and then set off a verdant Soon she was writing about what she saw there, becoming one of the first women in Europe to report from the front. Her work was published at Demetta that was the publication that her husband edited, and she published at other journals and newspapers as well. Then this work was published as a collection called The Long Hours after the war was over. She focused a lot of her wartime writing on how the war was affecting women and children. This wasn't a subject that many other reporters were really covering. But this work is also lyrical, more sentimental, and sometimes even romanticized, especially when compared to writers who were focused more on the war's horrific and violent aspects. In Secrets of the Flesh, a Life of Colette, biographer Judith Thurman writes, quote, there is not a single corpse in any of her dispatches. There is anxiety, but no despair, hunger but no starvation. Some of this is probably a byproduct of where Colette was and what she personally witnessed, but it's also one of the running themes of her life. She often did not directly comment on or seemed to notice political crises or major world events unless they personally affected her. For example, most of what we talked about in part one of this episode took place during the Drefist affair, which we covered on the show as a two parter in one, and that was something that divided French society, and we didn't mention it because Collette's surviving writing never even mentions it, and we don't really know what her opinions were on it, although we do know Weallye, who she was married to at the time, was anti Semitic and anti Drefussar. On the rare occasion that Collette did directly comment on things like politics, her opinions didn't really align with what a person might expect based on what we have talked about in her life so far, like she took dance lessons and started publishing her work under her own name in preparation to leave her husband, and all of that ran contrary to what was expected of women. She tried to make a life for herself under her own terms, and one of the themes of her writing is that women should be able to feel fulfilled, including having sexual fulfillment in their lives. But she didn't think of herself as a feminist or advocate for political equality regardless of sex. In nineteen ten, she told an interviewer that she thought suffragists were disgusting and said they deserved quote the whip and the harem. After the war was over, Alrid de Juvenna traveled to Geneva as part of France's delegation to the Disarmament Commission, and Collett's role expanded at Lamenta. In addition to working as a theater critic, she became literary editor, including deciding which works of fiction Lomentin should publish. She also turned her attention back to writing fiction herself, which she had not done much of during the war. The result was Cherie, published serially and then as a book in nineteen twenty. This is about an affair between a forty nine year old woman named Leah and a five year old man named Bread, known as Cherie. This follows their affair through to its necessary end, and the end of that affair leaves both of them heartbroken all the Collette originally envisioned this as a play. It became one of her best known novels, especially in France. That same year she was named Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor. After Colette had started publishing Cherry Alri's ex wife, Sarah, sent their son Bertran to try to convince Colette to persuade Enri to allow Sarah to keep using her married name. The de Juvenal name carried a lot of Prestigian influence, and Henri seems to have felt like Sarah was abusing that privilege and was annoyed about it. Bertran was sixteen, the same age that Colette had been when she met her first husband. Really, Collette seduced Bertran, and her behavior toward him, and her descriptions of all this are pretty manipulative and predatory. Bertron had a girlfriend his own age, Pamela, the sister of one of his school friends, when Colette, who was forty eight, started seducing him. This included giving him books from her library to read, and one of those books us Cherie about this affair between an older woman and a much younger man. She later said, quote, I invented Leah as a premonition. The biography we mentioned earlier described the Villa of rose Ven, where Colette spent her summers, as quote a hotbed of Chicovian drama. During this time, Collette also passed letters back and forth between Bertrand and Pamela and used their relationship as the basis for Leblon abb or The Ripening Seed, which came out in That was also the year that Ari found out what was going on, either Colette admitted it to him or he caught them together. He was outraged and left Colette immediately. Ari had numerous affairs during their marriage, but his wife sleeping with his teenage son was obviously something very different from that. Bertrand described himself as horrified to have been the cause of all this chaos and strife. Given aure's position at Lamadon, Colette had to stop working there after a few months. She went to work at one of the publication's rivals, Le Journal, and she and Bertramp continued to have a pretty public relationship in Paris. This, of course, led to a lot of scandal and gossip, more connected to the fact that Bertrand was Colette's husband's son than their respective ages. Eventually, Bertrand's engagement was announced to Marcel Pratt, and Colette was extremely jealous and kept trying to convince him to stay with her instead, but Bertrand's wedding went on as planned. In Collette published a sequel to Sari called The Last of Schari the following year. In its after Years Apart, Schari returns to Leah and finds her older and heavier, and he's no longer attracted to her. He takes his own life at the end of the book, which is one of a number of suice sides in Colette's writing. By the time this book was published, Colette had met someone else, Maurice Gudiquette, who was thirty five. He had long been a fan of her work, and at first he found her really intimidating, but their relationship would continue for the rest of her life. During that time, she would evolve from being thought of as a perpetual source of scandal, chaos, and controversial literature to a more mature and knowing woman whose long experience had given her perspective on things like love and loss, and also for having a deep love of fine things, including good food and wine, and taking joy in indulgence. She would eventually say of herself justue gourmet gourmand gluton or I am gourmet greedy gluttonius. We'll have more on her life. After a quick sponsor break before his death in nineteen twenty two, Marcel Proust had been widely regarded as France's greatest living writer. After that point, in a lot of people's opinion, France's greatest writer was Colette. As the nineteen twenties progressed, Colette decided to sell the villa of Roseven that she and Missy had purchased so that she could purchase another place near Central Bay. She continued to both write and act, including a touring production of Sherry with herself in the role of Leah. She published a series of stories about her childhood called My Mother's House in nineteen twenty two. In ninety eight, she was named an officer in the French Legion of Honor, and a year later she published Sido, which was a memoir of her mother's Sidonie, who had died in nineteen twelve. We talked about how much she admired and aspired to be like her mother, and a lot of people had pointed out that like it took a while before she returned to the idea of her mother and her writing. After her mother's death, Colette and Maurice struggled financially after the Great Depression started in Maurice had been a pearl merchant, and his business had already become a lot less profitable, in part because the fashion world was turning toward costume jewelry. He eventually gave up his pearl business and started selling things like used washing machines. Then, in nineteen thirty one, Colette broke her fibula. She developed ulcers around her cast, so doctors removed it much earlier than they normally would. Colette later developed arthritis, which was progressively disabling and painful, and Maurice believed this break and how it was treated were a factor. Colette tried many different treatments for this condition, including thermal baths, acupuncture, and during the nineteen forties X ray treatments, some of which caused burns on her stomach and legs. In ninety two, Colette published a Plezzier or These Pleasures, which would later be revised and republished as The Pure and the Impure. She later described this as the closest she would ever come to an autobiography, and included a lot of her thoughts on love and passion, especially in terms of same sex relationships. That included an account of the ladies of Longcotland, who we covered on the podcast back in that one made a return to people's feeds in as part of an episode or a pot sort of a playlist of all of our favorites. She also continued to appear on stage, including another portrayal of Leiah in a production of Sherry, although by this point she was visibly older than the character that she was portraying. She also opened a beauty institute in nineteen thirty two, where she made and sold perfumes and cosmetic treatments. She framed this as giving other women the power to enhance and preserve their beauty and stave off aging, and a lot of people thought the whole idea was way beneath the right or of such national stature. The institute only lasted for about a year, though it seems like she more or less just kind of lost interest in Collette and Maurice got married in a civil ceremony. They had been together for about a decade, and he was forty five and she was sixty two. Their decision to get married at this point was at least ostensibly a practical one, not necessarily a romantic one. They were planning a trip to New York and they'd heard that the hotels might not rent them a room together if they were not married. This relationship seems to have been happy, stable and loving. Maurice later said of it, quote, I set myself gently by the side of this woman whom life had so wounded, and I did so with the firm determination of proving to her that fidelity was not an empty word. Year by year she grew more persuaded of this, and her last books bear witness to a serenity that she would not otherwise have acquired. The year Collette and Maurice got married, Ari de Juvenell died, and the year after that Colette published My Apprenticeships, which is both the story of how she became a writer and a look at her relationship with her first husband, Arigotie Viler, also known as Really. He had died back in one This is pretty scathing and its treatment of him. Her reputation of a writer was continuing to grow. In ninety six, she was named Commander in the French Legion of Honor. By that point, Adolph Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany. The Nazi Party had been made Germany's only legal political party, and had passed discriminatory laws restricting virtually every aspect of Jewish people's lives and stripping them of German citizenship. Tensions were escalating in Europe and in Asia, and Italy had invaded Ethiopia, but as was the case with so many other major events, Collette didn't really seem to pay much attention to any of it. This was true even after Paris fell to the German army in nineteen forty, after which the French government moved to Vichy and began collaborating with the Nazi Party, And it was true even though Maurice Gutiquet was Jewish. But then on December seven, nineteen forty one, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the United States made its formal entry into World War Two. The French resistance increased its activities, and in response, Hitler issued what was known as the Night and Fog Decree, allowing German authorities to arrest people who were believed to be part of the resistance or otherwise in endangering German interests. The name night and Fog came from the idea that these arrests, which really were essentially kidnappings, would happen during the night, with people simply disappearing from site, they would be detained and they would be tried in secret courts. On December twelfth, ninety one, the Gestapo arrived at the Paris apartment in the Palais Royale, where Colette and Maurice were living. This is something neither of them seemed to have thought of as a possibility, and they were not at all prepared for it. Colette and their housekeeper were able to pack a small bag for Maurice before he was taken away. This was obviously terrifying for everyone, especially because both Colette and Maurice don't seem to have considered that something like this could happen. Collette said that for the rest of her life, her mouth would start trembling anytime someone unexpectedly arrived at her door. Maurice was held at a detention camp northeast of Paris. He later described this as a place where he was not given much to eat, and their betting was infested with vermin, but at least for fit and healthy people, things were manageable and the guards mostly left them alone. He managed to have notes to Collette smuggled out of the camp from time to time, most of them asking for things like food or books. Meanwhile, Colette tried to free him, calling in favors, talking to anybody she thought might be able to help. Eventually, on February six ninety two, he was freed on the order of Otto Abbott's, who was the German ambassador to vic France. He had married a French woman named Suzanne de Breiker in two She had convinced her husband to intervene on Collette's behalf. After Maurice's release from the camp, they remained in Paris. A couple of months later, they had tea with Susanne de Breiker at the German embassy. That June, the Nazis ordered Jewish people in France and a number of other countries to start wearing yellow stars. This is something that Colette described her husband as not particularly bothered by. It was only after Viscy authorities started deporting thousands of Jewish people from France and one of Colett's Jewish friends took her own life that they started to believe that Paris might be too dangerous. They went to centro Pe using forged papers. Eventually, Maurice made his way back to Paris and remained in hiding there. Collette made her way back as well, and they were both in Paris when it was liberated in August of n Shortly before the liberation of Paris, Missy dea Bouf, who we talked about in Part one, died by suicide sometime after the immediate aftermath of their breakup had subsided. Missy and Colette had gotten in contact again. They kept up a correspondence for most of the rest of their lives. Missy died at the age of eighty one, having outlived many close friends and also started to experience some cognitive decline. As was the case with much of what happened in the world during Colette's lifetime, she did not really comment on the events of World War two or speak out against the Nazi Party's violent anti semitism, even as it targeted her husband. We do not really know her thought process on this. Some scenarios are easy to imagine, like she may have understood that if she were publicly vocal on any of this, her husband's life would be at risk. But she's described as being a passive collaborationist during World War two, and she also published a lot of her work in pro visy anti Semitic journals. During the war, she also published a novel, Julie de Carnilon, which contained a lot of anti Semitic language. Even generously, this was not good, any of it. One of Collette's more well known novellas, especially in the United States, was one of the works she published in a pro VC journal during World War Two. This was Gig, which was published in This is the story of a girl in Paris whose grandmother and great aunt are training her to be a high class courtisan. Does not go exactly the way that those two women are planning for her. After the war was over, Collette chose Audrey Hepburn to play the role of Gigi on Broadway, and that launched hep Barn's career. She was also made into a musical film in and that film won all nine Academy Awards that it was nominated for. Collette did not live to see this version of her novella, though, and we're going to talk about that after we pause for a sponsor break. As we mentioned earlier, Collette developed arthritis and it worsened during World War Two. We've also talked about how Collette really hated the idea of aging, and in her younger years she had kept up a fitness regiment to both sculpt what her body looked like and to hopefully prevent physical problems later on in her life. Her body changed a lot as she got older, but she had really hoped that she was going to be active and physically well all the way until the end. So her disability and the chronic pain that accompanied it were just very, very upsetting to her. She tried to remain in good spirits, and if she thought she was sinking too far into despair, she would think about when the Gestapo came from Maurice. She thought that was the worst thing that could ever happen to her, and it had already happened. She spent most of the last years of her life in an apartment in Paris that overlooked the Palais Royal Gardens, an apartment that she described as quote another country home in Paris. Her bed was pushed against the window so she could see outside and sit in the fresh air when the weather was good. For a time, she was still able to travel, and she and Maurice would stay with friends or in hotels, or visit spas and thermal baths with the hope that she would get some pain relief. But the more trouble she had with her mobility, the less this was possible. This was an upstairs apartment, it was not accessible to her. Getting downstairs required her and her wheelchair to be carried. That was something that required two strong people to do. Maurice thought about moving them to a first floor apartment where this wouldn't be an issue, but worried that that kind of relocation would just be too upsetting for her, and then she would also no longer have the view of the gardens that she loved so much. After World War two, there had been a wave of effort in France to seek out and prosecute people who had collaborated with Germany. Many writers who had published in the pro Vichy press had their work boycotted, and some faced death threats and violence, but Collette's reputation was seemingly unaffected by her publishing in a range of pro Vissy journals during the war. On May second, she was elected to the French literary organization known as the Academy goncur. She was only the second woman to be so honored at mondegoncour who established the Academy, had specified in his will that it was not open to women or Jews. He also excluded poets and members of the Academy fonseai Is. In ninety Colette was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, although that prize went to T. S. Eliott. In nineteen fifty three, she was named Grand Officer in the French Legion of Honor. Colette died in Paris on August third, nineteen fifty four, at the age of eighty one. Maurice wrote an account of her death and which he said that as she was dying, she kept admonishing him to look. Look. He couldn't see what was so absorbing and so wondrous to her, and thought she must be seeing paradise. He later said of her quote. For thirty years she enabled me to live in a fairy world. It is often mentioned that Colette was denied Catholic funeral rites because of her divorces and remarriages, which is true, but she had not left any instructions for what should happen to her after her death, aside from the instruction that no one should see her. The request for a Catholic funeral had come from Maurice. Colette wasn't dead honored with a state funeral in France on August seventh, nineteen fifty four. She was buried at pearl Ches Cemetery. Maurice had become her literary executor. He later wrote a book about their life together called pret to Colette or Close to Collette. He later remarried and also became a father at the age of seventy one. He wrote a memoir about this, called The Delights of Growing Old, which was published in nineteen sixty six. He died on January nineteen seventy seven. Her daughter died in nineteen eighty one and was buried next to Collette at Parlaches. Collette was regarded as a national icon in France by the time of her death, and her work was widely read and deeply beloved. She wrote at least fifty books, along with plays and articles, and a ton of letters. She was a very avid correspondent. Although some of her books had been translated into other languages during her lifetime, she didn't become as widely known in many other parts of the world until later. In the UK and the US, her popularity didn't really take hold until the nineteen seventies thanks to a surging interest in women's literature. Will end with a quote from her work that, to me evokes both collette style of writing and how she viewed her own life and work. She published the short story Levrial de Vane, or The Tendrils of the Vine in Night. This was part of a collection of stories by the same name. She wrote it before her separation from Willie, in the early years of her career as a writer. It's framed as a legend that the nightingale didn't used to sing at night until he woke to find that he had become entangled in a fast growing vine. The nightingale feared that he would die, and so he swore to stay awake and sing for as long as the vine grew. While singing, he discovered his own voice and fell in love with it. Singing quote, I want to say say say everything. I know, everything, I think, everything, I guess everything which delights and hurt and astonishes me. That is called who. As I said at the beginning of part one, aren't of her life file Love and other parts? I'm like, no, that was that was bad girl. What do you have a listener mail for us? I do? This is from Cindy. Cindy wrote to us after we talked in our most recent Unearthed episodes about watermelon seeds and eating roasted watermelon seeds, and yes, Hi, Holly and Tracy, longtime fan of the show. I've never really been compelled to write, but when you mentioned trying roasted watermelon seeds, I just felt the need to act. Roasted in seasoned watermelon seeds her popular snack in China and a staple at gatherings. I would say they taste like a slightly sweeter sunflower seed. As much as I like eating them, though, I dreaded them being brought out at a party because it almost always meant that no matter when we said we were going to leave, and how late it got, the adults would chatter away for another hour or two, a pile of seed husks slowly growing between them on the table. As the oldest child in the family and among my parents friends, it just meant I had to sit among the toddlers a little longer. Still, though, it's one of my favorite snacks, and I think that if you like sunflower or pumpkin seeds, you should definitely give them a try. You can find the seeds at most local Chinese supermarkets, but I've included a link to a brand my family likes, as well as pictures of my cat and pup. My girlfriend and I adopted the kittie about five months ago and his name is Eggs Benedict. I love it, me do. He's the most active cat I've ever seen and loves to join us on hikes. The pup is Cedric, and I started listening to your show around the time when I adopted him about six years ago. I'm sure he would recognize your voices in a crowd. At this point, You've kept us company on many a long drive. Thanks for all you do, and please keep up the great work. Cindy. Cindy sent a picture of um they are They are soy sauce watermelons needs. Other folks had also let us know that if there are things that you can pick up at Chinese or other Asian supermarkets, and then of course animal pictures, which we always super super love. So thank you so much for letting me know that. About watermelon seeds, I don't know that they have ever caught my eye when I have been in one of the very out of our various local Asian groceries, So thank you. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcasts were at History Podcasts at i heart radio dot com. We're also on social media at missed in History and Let's Throw Find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, in Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app or wherever you 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.