How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance

by Marilyn Yalom

  Colette was beginning to perform, not only in amateur theatricals but also in professional shows, much to the dismay of Willy’s family, who, like most respectable bourgeois, considered actresses only one step above prostitutes. She and Missy took pantomime lessons with the famous teacher Georges Wague, and decided to put on a show created by Missy. Dream of Egypt (Rêve d’Egypte) presented Missy in the part of a male scholar who resurrects an Egyptian mummy, played by Colette. Even before their sensational onstage kiss, the couple were bombarded by negative publicity. Whoever heard of a female member of the aristocracy, dressed as a man, appearing onstage at the Moulin Rouge! At the premiere, the opposition led by Missy’s ex-husband was so vocal and violent that their teacher, Wague, was obliged to replace Missy in subsequent performances. But Colette, with her feline Egyptian movements, was so successful that it launched her as a mime and public performer. For the next four years, she would go from success to success, traveling throughout France, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland in various spectacles, including stage adaptations from the Claudine series and a play called La Chair (The Flesh), in which she caused a sensation by baring one of her breasts. It is to this period that we owe the many tender letters she wrote to Missy, letters that attest to their mutual devotion and to Colette’s dependence on Missy for emotional and financial support.9

  Bordeaux, late September 1908: “I love you. I miss you. I miss you more than anything. Be good, take care of yourself. My God! You have made me forget how to live alone, I who had a kind of intense, melancholy taste for solitude. I love you.”

  Brussels, late November 1908: “I kiss you, my sweet velvet. Kiss me fully, as in the carriage when I accompanied you to the station.”

  Lyon, early December 1908: “I am, to my very depths, profoundly grateful for all that you are for me, for all that you do for me. I kiss you with all my heart, my dear love.”

  In the spring of 1909, Colette went on tour with a theatrical adaptation of Claudine in Paris. Missy accompanied her as her makeup artist, dresser, and hair stylist. During a short separation, a letter from Liège dated May 14 thanks Missy for her generous help and warns Missy to be careful of her health. A day later she wrote again: “My God, without you I am practically nothing.”

  In early June, from Marseille, Colette wrote one of her most tender love letters.

  My dear love, I have finally received a letter from you, the first one! I’m very pleased. It’s grumbling, it’s nice, and I find it delicious because you say that you miss your odious child. My darling, that’s enough to fill me with joy, and I’m blushing, all alone, with pleasure, with a sort of loving pride. I hope this word does not shock you, my modest little Missy; there’s really no word other than love that can express the complete, exclusive tenderness I feel for you.

  Throughout 1909 and 1910, Colette continued her itinerant career. In addition to her frenetic theatrical work—sometimes as many as thirty-two performances in thirty-two days in thirty-two French cities—she managed to produce another novel, written in hotel rooms and trains, which was published in serial form under the title The Vagabond.

  Renée, the protagonist of The Vagabond, is far removed from the girlish Claudine. Thirty-four years old, she is a mime and a dancer (like Colette) pursued by a slightly younger, somewhat fatuous admirer. He rekindles in her the flame of heterosexual desire. “Suddenly my mouth, in spite of itself, lets itself be opened, opens of itself as irresistibly as a ripe plum splits in the sun.”10 Sensual lovemaking is carried to a new level of intensity, but so is the protagonist’s need for independence. She is no longer the young woman under male sway. Despite her suitor’s devotion and economic ease, Renée rejects his marriage proposal in favor of freedom and continued vagabondage.

  Once again, literature was rooted in lived experience, for Colette was having an affair with Auguste Hériot, youthful heir to the Grands Magasins du Louvre department store, and she made no secret of it to Missy. In the summer of 1910, Missy, as generous as always to her “child,” bought an estate in Brittany and deeded it to Colette. By the next summer, Colette and Missy were no longer together.

  Yet it was not Hériot and his fortune who won Colette away from Missy, but another, more formidable man: Henri de Jouvenel. Jouvenel was sufficiently rich, possessed a title, and, more important, had an intellect and character strong enough to match her own. As a political journalist and later as a politician, Jouvenel became famous enough to have a street named after him in the sixth arrondissement. Their marriage, from 1912 to 1924, produced a daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, born when Colette was almost forty.

  Characteristically, Colette chose her life as a writer, actress, and sexual woman over her life as a mother. She sent her daughter off to their country estate with an English nanny and rarely saw her during her early years. Nothing could dissuade Colette from her relentless pursuit of self-realization—not marriage (Henri proved unfaithful and she followed suit), not motherhood (she neglected her daughter), not sex (she had numerous lovers, male and female), not incest (she had a scandalous affair with her stepson Bertrand de Jouvenel), not religion (her third husband, Maurice Goudeket, was Jewish), not sickness (she suffered from debilitating arthritis in her later years), not the condemnation of the Catholic Church (it ultimately refused her a Christian burial). Instead, when she died in 1954, she was given a state funeral—the first given to any Frenchwoman—and was buried in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. She wrote around fifty novels, some of which have been made into smashing films: Gigi with Leslie Caron, Chéri with Michelle Pfeiffer. Whatever else Colette did, she incarnated for over half a century the Frenchwoman who “lives her own life” (vit sa vie) and she probably made it possible for many other Frenchwomen, including lesbians, to live theirs more fully.

  For the most part, Americans are unfamiliar with the lesbian culture that thrived in Paris from 1900 to World War II. If they have heard of Colette, they associate her primarily with her later heterosexual novels and films, namely, Chéri and Gigi, and with photos of her and her trademark cats. They are even less familiar with the life and writings of Natalie Barney, even though she was American by birth. Barney has always been better known in France than in the English-speaking world. But there was one lesbian couple living in Paris during the first half of the twentieth century who have become popular icons in American culture. I am speaking, of course, of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. As I write this in June 2011, there are two major exhibitions in San Francisco featuring Stein: the first at the Contemporary Jewish Museum deals with Stein’s life in Paris; the second at the Museum of Modern Art brings together the avant-garde paintings collected in Paris by Stein and her brothers.

  Stein settled in Paris with her brother Leo in the fall of 1903. Their apartment at 27, rue de Fleurus was to become the choice meeting place of modernist painters and writers until World War II. Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway—these are only the best-known of hundreds of personalities who were regulars at the Stein residence. From 1907 on, the regulars were received not only by Stein but also by the woman who became Stein’s lifelong companion, Alice B. Toklas.

  Like Gertrude, Alice was of German Jewish origin and had been raised in the California Bay area. Whereas Gertrude had been educated at Radcliffe College and then at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine before coming to France, Alice had remained at home as caretaker to her widowed father, and it was only after her father’s death that she was able to break free from family obligations. Alice arrived in Paris with a San Francisco friend, Harriet Levy, but soon found herself under the spell of the not-to-be-denied and oh-so-imposing Gertrude Stein. At the time of their meeting, Gertrude was thirty-four and Alice thirty-one. Gertrude was short, heavy, and mannish in appearance; Alice was even shorter, thin, and distinctly feminine. Almost immediately they fell into the roles of husband and wife, though Alice did not move in with Gertrude until 1910. Three years later, Leo moved out.

  As a couple, Gertrude and Alice did not resemble the theatrical lesbians su
rrounding Natalie Barney. They did not hang out at lesbian bars, such as Le Monocle on the boulevard Edgar-Quinet, where the female staff dressed as men. They were a stable monogamous twosome, with each assuming the duties of the gender she had chosen. Gertrude was the “man,” the writer, the intellectual, the breadwinner—well, she had money from an inheritance. Alice was the homemaker, overseeing meals and arranging their social calendar. She sewed, embroidered, and created stunning vests for her beloved “hubby.” As Hemingway recalled, when guests came to visit, Alice chatted with the wives, while Hemingway and the men spoke to Gertrude.

  Gertrude was not shy in telling the world that she was a genius. She saw herself as a groundbreaking writer, just as Picasso was a groundbreaking painter. She created a modernist style in her early fiction (for example, Three Lives, The Making of the Americans) that has been compared to the innovations of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, even if she never achieved their literary greatness. Her wordplay, which privileged sound over sense, has the effect of creating an insistent present moment and avoids conventional narration. The average reader will find many of her works enigmatic, if not incomprehensible, except for her highly popular autobiography titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which made her a celebrity. During her 1934 lecture tour of the United States, she was accompanied by Alice, identified as her “secretary” and the “one who makes life comfortable for me.”11 The Autobiography gives a guarded picture of Gertrude and Alice’s domestic partnership and a fuller account of their lively social life, dominated by Gertrude’s massive presence.

  For a peek inside their intimate relationship, one can read their love notes, published posthumously in 1999 under the title Baby Precious Always Shines.12 Here Gertrude reveals her abiding affection for Alice.

  When all is told lovely

  baby precious does not

  mind the cold, when

  little hubby surrounds

  her warm, the cold

  cannot do her harm . . .

  Dear Mrs.

  I take my pen in hand to congratulate

  you dear Mrs. on the extremely promising

  Husband you have. He promises everything

  And he means it too. . . .

  My dearest wife,

  This little pen which

  belongs to you loves to be

  written by me for you, its

  never in a stew nor are

  you my sweet ecstacy.

  Baby precious I worked

  until I got all quieted

  down, and I love my baby,

  and we are always happy

  together and that is all

  that two loving ones need

  my wifey and me.

  The union between Gertrude and Alice lasted almost fifty years. It survived two world wars, a decline in Stein’s fortune, and major quarrels with numerous friends and relatives. Somehow Gertrude and Alice managed to love each other with exemplary devotion. It is unlikely that they could have lived together so “normally” anywhere but Paris. The French gave them a home where they could realize their American ideal of monogamous marriage long before it would have been possible in their own home country.

  Parisian lesbian culture went underground during the German occupation of France. Since the Nazis fiercely persecuted homosexuals in Germany and Italy and sporadically in occupied France, gay men and women had to be extremely circumspect if they did not want to land in prison or a concentration camp. The Vichy government enacted laws that raised the age of sexual consent for homosexual activity to twenty-one, while it remained fifteen for heterosexuals. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas spent the war years in the southeastern mountain town of Bilignin, where they had a summer home. Triply threatened as Jews, lesbians, and Americans, they depended on the protection of a French friend, Bernard Faÿ, who is known to have collaborated with the Gestapo, yet used his influence to save the lives of Gertrude and Alice. Gertrude lived long enough to see the war end and to be fêted as an unlikely survivor. But cancer of the stomach ended her life in 1946, and she went to join Oscar Wilde, Proust, and Colette in the Père- Lachaise Cemetery.

  Another lesbian writer survived the war years in Paris under very different circumstances. Violette Leduc, a poor illegitimate country girl without higher education, worked in a publisher’s office where, according to her own assessment, she probably wouldn’t have had a job if Paris had not been “stripped of all its really able people.”13 Three novels published after the war and especially her 1964 breakthrough work, La Bâtarde (the English edition kept the French title) are all forms of autofiction that highlight both her lesbian and her heterosexual experiences. No writer before Leduc—not even Colette—had ever written so graphically about lesbian sexuality.

  When I first read La Bâtarde, I was stunned. Leduc had given voice to female sexuality such as I had never heard expressed before. She knew how to evoke the absolute delight experienced by the body through the skin, as well as through the mouth, breasts, and genitals. Freud calls this “polymorphous perversity” because he is speaking from a male point of view that privileges penetration. I thought: if Leduc is describing lesbian sex, then I’m missing something. Some of us, even committed heterosexuals like myself, will feel pleasantly aroused by Leduc’s description of making love for the first time in the bed of her boarding school classmate, separated from others in the dormitory only by the curtains surrounding each bed. See for yourself.

  Isabelle is kissing me I said to myself. She was tracing a circle around my mouth, . . . she laid a cool kiss in each corner two staccato notes of music on my lips, then her mouth pressed against mine once more, hibernating there. My eyes were wide with astonishment beneath their lids, the seashells at my ears were whispering too loud.

  . . .

  We were still hugging each other, we both wanted to be swallowed up by the other. We had stripped ourselves of our families, the rest of the world, time, and light. As Isabelle lay crushed over my gaping heart I wanted to feel her enter it. Love is a harrowing invention.

  . . .

  Her tongue began to press against my teeth impatient to make me warm all over. I shut myself up, I barricaded myself inside my mouth. She waited: that was how she taught me to open into flower. She was the hidden muse inside my body. Her tongue, her little flame, softened my muscles, my flesh. I responded, I attacked, I fought, I wanted to emulate her violence. We no longer cared about the noise we made with our lips. We were relentless with each other . . .

  . . .

  She opened the neck of my nightgown she explored the curve of my shoulder with her cheek, with her brow. I accepted the marvels she was imagining on the curve of my shoulder. . . .

  Isabelle was drawing a snail with her finger on the bare patch we have behind our earlobes. . . .

  A flower opened in every pore of my skin.

  Violette, the novice, thought she would be satisfied without genital stimulation, but Isabelle, the experienced one, insisted on exploring Violette in all the folds of her flesh. Even the passages describing the most intimate parts of her body are written with a kind of lyricism that manages to escape pornography. Isabelle helped Violette cope with her deeply entrenched sense of ugliness, incarnated in her large nose, and the shame she felt as the illegitimate daughter of a former domestic. Isabelle was the first of Violette’s lovers—both female and male—who were drawn into her troubled life.

  Among her later friends, Leduc conceived a passion for the acclaimed author Simone de Beauvoir, and though Beauvoir kept an emotional distance from “the Ugly Woman,” she encouraged Leduc’s literary aspirations and was generous with her time, money, and editorial advice for over two decades. Leduc’s account of her one-sided love for Madame (Beauvoir) in L’Affamée (Ravenous) had a “quasi-religious tone.”14 She would submit to any form of discipline in order to become worthy of her idol. So Leduc plugged away at her writing under Beauvoir’s tutelage until, in 1964, she published her masterpiece, La Bâtarde, for which Beauvoir wrote a
supportive preface. Beauvoir had hoped that La Bâtarde would win a major literary prize. While it did not, it sold several hundred thousand copies in its first years and remains in print to this day.15 Not too bad for an ugly woman.

  If Beauvoir refused Leduc’s overtures, it was not because of her sex, as we shall see in the next chapter.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Existentialists in Love

  Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

  MY LOVE, YOU AND I ARE ONE, AND I FEEL THAT I AM YOU AS MUCH AS YOU ARE ME.

  Simone de Beauvoir to Jean-Paul Sartre, October 8, 1939

  NEVER HAVE I FELT SO FORCEFULLY THAT OUR LIVES HAVE NO MEANING OUTSIDE OF OUR LOVE.

  Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, November 15, 1939

  Tombstone of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Montparnasse Cemetery, 2011. Author’s photograph.

  Like their medieval ancestors Abélard and Héloïse, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir became an iconic couple during their lifetime. They remain the most famous French couple of the twentieth century, even though they never married, were frequently separated, and engaged in numerous affairs with other men and women. This unique relationship that endured for five decades shocked many of their contemporaries and still causes fierce debate among disciples and detractors, who write their biographies, attend conferences on their work, and sound off against each other in newspapers and academic articles. How is it that Beauvoir and Sartre still inspire and infuriate so many people?

  When I first went to France as a junior-year student in the fall of 1952, Sartre and Beauvoir dominated the intellectual life of the Left Bank. Sartre, at forty-seven, had already published four novels, a collection of short stories, three plays, several books of literary criticism, a biography of Baudelaire, reflections on the Jewish question, and his major existential treatise, Being and Nothingness. My Wellesley College 1952 summer reading list for French majors included his popular Existentialism and Humanism. Beauvoir had not yet made it onto the Wellesley College reading list, though she was, at forty-four, the awesome author of three novels, a treatise with the paradoxical title The Ethics of Ambiguity, a journalistic account of her travels in the United States, and her revolutionary two-volume study of women, The Second Sex. Their prodigious output dwarfed that of all their rivals. Their legendary union offered a model of commitment, without legal or religious imprimatur, designed to enrage les bien pensants (the self-righteous) and to inflame the imaginations of the young, such as myself. Their shared philosophy of existentialism, based on the premise that God does not exist and that we are obliged to create meaning in a world devoid of predetermined meaning, encouraged myself and others in my student group to question our homegrown religious beliefs.