Brilliant Humility - Stories of Mediatresses/Goddesses I

'sit down and put down everything that comes
into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is
one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.'
-- (Sidonie Gabrielle) "Colette"
Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, France (1873-1954).

At the age of 20, she married an older man, a writer and critic who employed
a number of ghostwriters. He convinced Colette to write down stories about her childhood and embellish them with juicy details. When she did, he published them in his name as Claudine at School (1900), the first novel in the Claudine series, about an outspoken, clever young woman whodiscovers a love affair between a headmistress and a young female teacher. Colette's early writing was forced labor:her husband locked her in a room until she had produced enough pages for the day, and he kept the royalties.

She fled her husband in 1906, and became a Parisian music-hall performer famous for baring one breast while dancing. At the Moulin Rouge, she caused even more controversy when she took a woman into a passionate
embrace. The show caused a riot with the curtain brought down early.

Colette began to write at least one book a year, producing more than 80 volumes, including Chéri (1920), My Mother's House (1922) and Sido (1930). Proust admired her, and wrote to her to say that her novella Mitsou (1930), about a music-hall artist who falls in love with an officer on leave, had moved him to tears. In 1944, at the age of 72, she published Gigi, about a spontaneous young girl who is trained by courtesan in "the honorable habits of women without honor." It was adapted for the theater in 1951, with a young Audrey Hepburn in the title role, and later made into a movie. Collette, at her death was denied a Catholic Mass. She recounted in her later years how she wished she's appreciated