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