Colette

Colette wrote the Claudine novels that made her husband famous, spent six years on the music-hall stage after leaving him, and was given a state funeral by the French republic. She was born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Burgundy and married at twenty the writer and publisher Henry Gauthier-Villars, who wrote under the name Willy and ran what amounted to a fiction factory of ghostwriters. He locked her in a room to produce the Claudine books, published them under his own name, and kept the money; they were the publishing sensation of the Belle Epoque, with Claudine collars, perfumes and cigarettes sold on the back of them. She left him in 1906 with no rights to her own work and supported herself as a mime and dancer, appearing half-naked at the Moulin Rouge and causing a near-riot in 1907 by kissing her lover the Marquise de Belbeuf on stage. She wrote through all of it and did not stop for fifty years: Cheri, La Vagabonde, Gigi, Le Ble en herbe, and the Sido books about her mother, which are the ones she is loved for in France. Her third marriage was to a man sixteen years younger; her second stepson, at sixteen, she seduced, which she later wrote about. She was the first woman president of the Goncourt academy. Her Jewish husband Maurice Goudeket was arrested in 1941 and released after she intervened, and she hid him afterwards. Crippled by arthritis, she wrote in bed to the end. Gigi was adapted for the stage with Audrey Hepburn, whom Colette chose herself after seeing her in a hotel lobby. She was refused a religious funeral by the Catholic church because of her divorces. Thousands filed past the coffin in the Palais Royal.

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