In 1921, Bennett and his wife legally separated. They had been drifting apart for some years and Marguerite had taken up with Pierre Legros, a young French lecturer. Bennett sold Comarques and lived in London for the rest of his life, first in a flat near Bond Street in the West End, which he had taken during the war. For much of the 1920s he was widely known to be the highest-paid literary journalist in England, contributing an influential weekly column to Beaverbrook's "Evening Standard"; by the end of his career, he had contributed to more than 100 newspapers, magazines and other publications. He continued to write novels and plays as assiduously as before the war.