Colette left the stage and focused on her writing, working as theater critic and literary editor for Le Matin. For the next fourteen years she traveled in circles where European diplomacy was made. She still had affairs with men and women -- including one with her adolescent stepson Bertrand de Jouvenel -- but conducted herself less flamboyantly, and by the time her second marriage ended in 1925, she had established herself as France's leading woman of letters.