QI The Book of the Dead

stage. Fleeing Paris, Missy bought Colette a house in Brittany where she could write after her divorce from Willy. (Willy, unfortunately, had kept the copyright to Colette’s early successes, and she needed an independent income.) Colette started writing a column for the daily newspaper Le Matin . Aged thirty-seven, she fell in love with twenty-four-year-old Auguste Heriot but abandoned him in 1912 to marry the editor of Le Matin , the wealthy Baron Henri de Jouvenel. He was to prove just as unfaithful as her first husband. In 1913 they had a daughter, Bel-Gazou, whom Colette referred to as ‘a rat’. Motherhood was not going to interrupt her career. ‘My strain of virility’, she wrote, ‘saved me from the danger which threatens the writer, elevated to a happy and tender parent, of becoming a mediocre author.’ Bel-Gazou was left in the care of a nanny: it wasn’t unusual for Colette to pass six months without seeing her. At eight the child was sent to boarding school, and a friend of Colette’s revealed that ‘all weaknesses are forbidden her, above all asking for love …’
    Henri de Jouvenel had a teenage son, Bertrand, who was sixteen in 1919 when Colette seduced him. To be fair to forty-nine-year-old Colette, she had initially hired two prostitutes to take his virginity, but he was unable to perform. Colette persevered and succeeded where the professionals had failed. Bertrand later described his stepmother as ‘demanding, voracious, expert and rewarding’. Colette, by her own account, remained in love with Bertrand’s father, but he was preoccupied with work and other mistresses. Eventually they divorced but she carried on living with her stepson lover, an affair that lasted until he was twenty-three. Colette had a savage perm and a face-lift in an effort to ward off old age – quite an experimental operation in the 1920s. She told a friend that the secret of life was to ‘content yourself with a passing temptation, and satisfy it. What more can one be sure of than that which one holds in one’s arms at that very moment?’
    In 1935 she got married for the last time, to forty-five-year-old Maurice Goudeket. He soon ran out of money and before long he was selling second-hand washing machines and devices to unblock lavatories. Colette supported him with her royalties, and although he, too, took other lovers, he was jealous of any other men who paid her any attention right up until her death in 1954 at the age of eighty-one. His infidelities had never troubled Colette. She knew who was running the relationship. She understood that nothing sexual was ever straightforward, explaining to a friend that Maurice stayed with her because of her ‘male virility, which shocks him. When he sleeps with another woman he chooses one who is feminine, but he couldn’t actually live with a woman like that.’

     
    For Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962) it was the lack of male virility that posed a problem – not hers, but her husband’s. Marie wasthe great-grand-niece of Napoleon, and the last of the Bonaparte line. Her marriage to Prince George of Greece connected her to the royal families of Denmark, Russia and Great Britain (she was Prince Philip’s aunt). Prince George was tall, fair and handsome, but he never even kissed Marie while they were engaged, something she put down to his chastity and good breeding. On her wedding night George could not perform and scurried off to his uncle Waldemar’s bedroom for a pep talk. Returning with instructions on how to consummate the marriage he confessed, ‘I hate it as much as you do, but we must do it if we want to have children.’ When they left for their honeymoon, Uncle Waldemar helpfully came with them, and George cried when he left three days later. He was soon back, though, and as it was clear she wasn’t going to be able to shake him off Marie resolved to enjoy Uncle Waldemar’s company. He would kiss her passionately while George looked on. Marie sometimes joked that she had two husbands, but that she thought of George more as a brother than a husband. When Marie was a teenager, she had had an affair with her father’s secretary, a man called Leandri, who then blackmailed her with the love letters she wrote to him. Undeterred by this unpromising start, Marie took numerous other lovers throughout her life, including the French prime minister Aristide Briand, although none of them were to bring her physical satisfaction.
    As a young woman, Marie told her