This weekend’s heroine is the writer Colette, born on January 28, 1873!  

Born
in the Burgundy village of Saint-Saveur-en-Puisaye to a war hero father
and his wife, the family was orginally prosperous but suffered
finanical reversals.  She married in 1893 to Henri Gauthier-Villars
(“Willy”), a writer and publisher 14 years her senior.  Her first 4
books (the “Claudine” titles) were published under his name and
copywright.  When they separated in 1906 (and later divorced in 1910),
she had no income from her own writings.  She worked in journalism and
on the music hall stage, as well as practicing as an amateur
photographer.  She also had relationships with several women, including
the famous Natalie Barney, as she continued her writing.

In 1912,
she married Henri de Jouvenal, and in 1913 had her daughter
(‘Bel-Gazou”).  She published her very popular (and scandalous!) Cheri in
1920, and her writing career took off quickly.  She was divorced again
in 1924, and in 1925 married Maurice Goudeket, who was her husband for
the rest of her life.

The 1920s and ’30s were very productive for
her work, and she was acclaimed as France’s greatest female writer.  She
was 67 when the Germans occupied France, and she stayed in her Paris
apartment on the Palais-Royal despite the arrest of her Jewish husband
in 1941 (he was quickly released, and they spent the rest of the war
quietly).  In 1944, she wrote her most famous work, Gigi. 
Postwar, she was famous but ill with arthritis, nursed by her husband,
and continued to write.  (She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in
literature in 1948).  When she died on August 3, 1954, she was the first
French woman of letters to receive a state funeral, and was buried in
Pere Lachaise.

A couple of sources for her fascinating life:

Judith Thompson, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (1999)

Annie Goetzinger, The Provocative Colette (2018)