| Title | : | The Complete Claudine |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0374528039 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780374528034 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 632 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1903 |
Janet Flanner described these books as "amazing writing on the almost girlish search for the absolute of happiness in physical love . . . recorded by a literary brain always wide awake on the pillow."
The Complete Claudine Reviews
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That French bitch is crazy. In, like, the best possible way.
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Ha! Colette, you are a genius.
So it took me exactly two months to read this collection of all 4 Claudine novels.
You ever read a book, and it doesn’t really “click” with you until the very end, where you are like, my goodness, this book is incredible? This book was like that for me.
Claudine at School I liked well enough. The same can be said for the next 2 Claudine novels, which follow our vivacious and energetic young protagonist as she becomes accustomed to society and, eventually and inevitably, married.
But boy oh boy was I in for a rude awakening in the fourth Claudine novel, Claudine and Annie.
Colette has simply done something that I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen done so well in all of my reading.
She takes our previously wild, daring, hypnotic, rebellious, and even bisexual heroine, who previously was narrating the story from the first person point of view, and she thrusts her at us from another characters perspective entirely.
Annie, who is going through marital woes with a man she fears is not the husband she needed, encounters Claudine and Claudine takes the place of a sort of mentor to this young, worried girl, though at first she is more of a shock, as she startles Annie with her wild ways and loose tongue.
I don’t think I can put it to words justly, but when your previous three novels had one particularly wild and adventurous protagonist, and the last one has a different protagonist but the old protagonist suddenly becomes a reserved and careful mentor, and it’s done so seamlessly and intricately that it’s completely convincing, well I don’t have anything to say other than you are a literary genius.
And that is what Colette was. Genius.
What other author is brave enough to literally have a completely different main character for their final novel, and it actually works and we learn more about the previous main character than ever before?
Absolutely astounding. Colette, if I ever doubted you in my reading, my sincerest apologies. -
The Introduction
The book begins with an intriguing introduction by Judith Thurman, which I found helpful as I really knew little about Colette which she used as her writing pen-name.
She was a colourful, eccentric, driven character, a woman way ahead of her time, who wanted it all and seems to have pretty much lived her life, pursuing that goal, ignoring societal stereotypes and rejecting all labels about who, what and where a woman’s place should be, attracting as many admiring fans as scathing critics. She detested labels, and while her attitude may be thought of as feminist, she was far from abiding by political correctness or aligning herself with any kind of women’s group.“Me, a feminist?” she scoffed in a 1910 interview. “I’ll tell you what the suffragettes deserve: the whip and the harem.” She saw no contradiction between supporting conservative positions and living her life as an “erotic militant” in revolt against them. Better worlds and just rewards were of no more consequence to her than the prospect of an afterlife. – Judith Thurman,
She was born in the Burgundy village of Saint-Saveur-en- Puisaye on January 28, 1873, a countryside upbringing that informs the autobiographical Claudine at School; the first volume in this book. Her own school years were likely more conservative that those expressed in her novel, which was influenced by her husband Willy, the pen name she would use when these books were first published, as it was he who introduced her to avant-garde intellectual and artistic circles while engaging in sexual affairs and encouraging her to do the same. It was he who suggested the idea of “the secondary myth of Sappho…the girls’ school or convent ruled by a seductive female teacher” (Ladimer, p. 53)
Her mother, “Mme Colette – the splendid earth mother known to Colette’s readers as Sido” came from a family of mixed African and Creole descent from the colonies (Martinique) and:had boundless ambitions for her youngest daughter and “second self,” Gabrielle, and these never included domestic – or sentimental – drudgery. Sido called marriage, only half-ironically, a “heinous crime,” and would rejoice in Colette’s liaison from 1905 to 1911 with a cultivated and melancholy lesbian transvestite, the Marquise de Morny, largely because “Missy’s” generosity and solicitude were so wholesome for Colette’s fiction. Nor was Sido’s “precious jewel,” childless until forty, ever encouraged by her mother to procreate.
She published nearly 80 volumes of fiction, memoir, drama, essays, criticism, and reportage, Gigi the best known to readers in the English language, though unfortunately so according to Judith Thurman as its promise of happiness so misrepresents Colette’s view of love.
The character Claudine was Colette’s invention of the century’s first teenage girl, one who was rebellious, secretive, erotically restless and disturbed, free-spirited and determined to carve her own path. Her rebellion was against convention not family, she had free rein at home, her single parent father poring over his slug manuscript left her to her own devices, though somewhat constrained by the maid who took care of her basic needs.“It is not a bad thing that children
should occasionally, and politely,
put parents in their place.” Colette
Colette married at twenty(1893) and moved to Paris, separating from Willy in 1906 though with no access to royalties for her books as she had penned them in his name, leading her to a stage career in the music halls of Paris, her experience of that way of life informing her novel The Vagabond (1910).“a novel that anticipates by ninety years, the contemporary fashion for wry, first-person narratives by single, thirty something career women. Its heroine examines her addictions to men with amused detachment, and flirts, alternately, with abstinence and temptation. Is there love without complete submission and loss of identity? Is freedom really worth the loneliness that pays for it? These are Colette’s abiding questions.”
Her move to Paris heralded the beginning of a public personality, as she would go on to become one of the most notorious and exuberant personalities of fin-de-siècle Paris. Her subsequent divorce and the years working on the stage exposed her to a poverty consciousness she’d not until then experienced and induced in her a steely determination to be independent and earn her own living at all times. After his death, she sued to have his name removed from her earlier books.“The frugality of Virginia Woolf’s five hundred a year and a room of one’s own had as much allure for her as the ideals of Woolf’s feminism, which is to say, none at all. Colette’s models were never the gentlewomen of letters living on their allowances but the courtesans and artistes she had frequented in her youth, whose notion of a bottom line was fifty thousand a year and a villa of one’s own – with a big garden, a great chef, and a pretty boy.”
She would have a child (a daughter) at forty, though her maternal instinct never developed sufficiently for her to spend much time in the role of mother, allowing her to be raised by a nanny, though she marry the baby’s father Baron Henry de Jouvenel, an influential, flamboyant political journalist in Paris.
Below is a summary of
Lessons We Can Learn From Colette, written by Holly Isard on the anniversary of her death, 3 August, do click on the link to read the lessons, they provide an interesting insight into the individualist character Colette was and lived according to. Each lesson has a wonderful anecdote connected to it.
Famous for her free spirit as much her style of writing, Colette was a chronicler of female existence, a precursory feminist who pushed against the bounds of sexuality for women in Paris. To the abhorrence of Parisian society, Colette experimented with androgyny on and off stage. She also frequented the spaces where marginal sexualities were beginning to find some visibility, in the cabarets and pantomimes. Even 142 years after her birth, Colette remains an icon and an indisputably formidable woman. Here, we consider five key lessons we can learn from the great lady herself.
1. Continue on in the face of controversy
2. Stick with your gut instinct
3. Don’t underestimate a woman’s influence
4. “Perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.”
5. Change your name and cheat the rules
Claudine at School (Book 1)
In the young Claudine, the author Colette introduces us to a tomboyish, nature loving, confident girl raised without a mother, cared for in some respects by a maid, just as she had turned fifteen and is finishing her last year in school, with external exams approaching."Two months ago, when I turned fifteen and let down my skirts to my ankles, they demolished the old school and changed the headmistress. The long skirts were necessitated by my calves; they attracted glances and were already making me look too much like a young lady."
Her father is an eccentric, slug loving academic, with his head in his manuscript on the Malacology of the Region of Fresnois, who seems barely to notice that there is a girl turning into a young woman in his midst."He is entirely wrapped up in his work and it never occurs to him that I might be more suitably brought up in a convent or in some Lycée or other. There's no danger of my opening his eyes!"
While she excels at school with little effort, she is rebellious, provocative, manipulative and despite the trouble she causes and schemes she comes up with, there is no other place, except perhaps the woods, that she would rather be. School excites her, not for its lessons, but for the human drama that there is an endless supply of, and the chance for her imagination to stretch its bounds."Those French compositions, how I loathe them! Such stupid and disgusting subjects: "Write, so as to draw to your own physical and moral portrait, to a brother whom you have not seen for ten years;" (I have no fraternal bonds, I am an only child.) No one will ever know the efforts I have to make to restrain myself from writing pure spoof or highly subversive opinions! But, for all that, my companions - all except Anais - make such a hash of it that, in spite of myself I am the 'outstanding pupil in literary composition'."
Claudine develops an attachment to one of the Assistant teachers, nineteen year old Aimée and in order to spend more time with her exclusively, organises private English lessons at home. This seems to turn the new Headmistress against her even more so than was initially apparent, revealing a complex female tension within the school, tolerated only because of the Headmistress's special relationship to the District Superintendent of Schools.
Her closest companion might be her beautiful intelligent cat Fanchette, who loves her disinterestedly, despite the miseries she inflicts on her."You amused me from the moment you came into the world; you'd only got one eye open when you were already attempting warlike steps in your basket, though you were still incapable of standing up on your four matchsticks. Ever since, you've lived joyously, making me laugh with your belly dances in honour of cockchafers and butterflies, your clumsy calls to the birds you're stalking, your way of quarrelling with me and giving me sharp taps re-echo on my hands. Your behaviour is quite disgraceful: two or three times a year I catch you on the garden walls, wearing a crazy, ridiculous expression, with a swarm of tomcats around you."
The year passes with the continued dramas between the students, Claudine reconciles herself to friendship with Luce, the younger sister of Aimée, who complains incessantly of mistreatment by her older sister, whose sole attentions are for the Headmistress.
The girls take the train to go and sit their exams, requiring an overnight stay in another town and the daily stress of being called to present for the oral part of the exams, waiting for the night-time listing of who has been called back to present and at the end who has passed.
Never one to conform, Claudine refuses to take part in some of the collective activities and amuses herself by sneaking out and finding her way unaided to friends of the family, who are both shocked and delighted to receive her. Her somewhat privileged life, bereft of expectation, serve to make her school days full of opportunity to exercise her wit, charm, cunning and mild cruelty against her teachers and with her fellow pupils, as she proves herself more than a match for them all.
Her carefree days are about to come to an end however, as her father makes plans for them to move to Paris, the subject of the second novel in this volume The Complete Claudine, Claudine in Paris where she learns she may not have quite the same freedom to roam, as she has had in the countryside, for reasons her father appears mildly reluctant to expand on.
Claudine in Paris
After years of freedom in her beloved countryside of Montigny, having been Queen of her domain and revered in school, Claudine weakens on arrival in Paris, forcibly confined to the rooms within their new home in illness. She wonders what has happened to her, hardly recognising herself.
Her father assumes his previous habits, embarking on his latest project, confined to his library most days, employing an assistant to help him, a young man who appears to have a crush on Claudine.
Seeking company outside the home, Claudine asks after her father's sister."Why haven't we seen my aunt yet? Haven't you written to her? Haven't you been to see her?"
Papa, with the condescension one displays to mad people, asked me gently, with a clear eye and a soothing voice:
"Which aunt, darling?"
Accustomed to his absent-mindedness, I made him grasp that I was actually talking about his sister.
Thereupon he exclaimed, full of admiration:
"You think of everything! Ten thousand herds of swine! Dear old girl, how pleased she'll be to know we are in Paris." He added, his face clouding: "She'll hook on to me like a damn' leech."
She is delighted to finally meet her Aunt and to discover Marcel, the young man Claudine's age who she is guardian to, in fact Marcel is Claudine's nephew, sent to live with his grandmother after the premature death of his mother.
If Claudine at School represents the unfettered, exuberant joys of teenage freedom, of the innocent and immature love between friends and the cruel indulgences of playful spite, Claudine in Paris is the slap in the face of regarding an approaching adult, urban world, one where the streets are inhabited by hidden dangers, the skies are more gloomy, people are not what they seem, even old friends from school become unrecognisable when the city and her frustrated inhabitants get their clutch onto the innocent.
Claudine wants to embrace it all with the same fervour she did her old school, but discovers her own prudence, when confronted with the reality of entering adulthood."There I was, making myself out completely sophisticated and disillusioned and shouting from the rooftops 'Ha, ha! you can't teach me anything. Ha, ha! I read everything! And I understand everything even though I am only seventeen.' Precisely. And when it comes to a gentleman pinching my behind in the street or a little friend living what I'm in the habit of reading about, I'm knocked sideways. I lay about me with my umbrella or else I flee from vice with a noble gesture. In your heart of hearts, Claudine, you're nothing but a common everyday decent girl. How Marcel would despise me if he knew that!"
Marcel's father, whom she calls Uncle Renaud, introduces her to the theatre, she gets outfitted with a more appropriate wardrobe for a social life in Paris, she begins to delight in her new surroundings, although a melancholy often arises when she thinks of her life in the countryside, an affliction she thinks might be resolved by finding the right relationship."The lilies-of-the-valley on the chimney-piece intoxicated me and gave me a migraine. What was the matter with me? My unhappiness over Luce, yes, but something else too - my heart was aching with homesickness. I felt as ridiculous as that sentimental engraving hanging on the wall of Mademoiselle's drawing-room Mignon regretting her fatherland. And I thought I was cured of so many things and had lost so many of my illusions! Alas, my mind kept going back to Montigny."
She even misses her homework and having to explain those mindless subjects she used to abhor, such as 'Idleness is the mother of all vices,' one she has had the misfortune to come to understand better .
A marriage proposal awakens her from her misery, an idea forms in her mind and before we know it, the page has turned and we are into Claudine Married!
Claudine Married
The impulsive Claudine, thinking a marriage of her own making and choice (not one chosen by her father or suggested by a man who had feelings for her that weren’t reciprocated) embarks on her marital journey which begins with fifteen months of a vagabond life, travelling to Beirut (in this era it was a popular tourist destination and nicknamed “the Paris of the Middle East” due to its French influences and vibrant cultural and intellectual life), to Switzerland, Germany and the south of France.
It might have been more enjoyable had she not had to endure the many introductions to numerous of her husband’s friends and their families, whom he made himself most agreeable to and put himself out for, something the young bride was unable to fully appreciate.“As he explains, with impudent charm, it is not worthwhile doing violence to one’s nature to please one’s real friends, since one’s sure of them anyway…”
Claudine demands mercy and a fixed abode and thus this book of her marriage begins when they are reinstalled back in Paris, however Claudine still feels as though something is lacking. Before they returned she requested they visit Montigny and while unable to visit her childhood home (now rented), they visit the school and for a brief period she reconnects to something of her former self and notes one of the differences between herself and her husband in so doing.“How willingly I look back over this recent past and dwell on it! But my husband lives in the future. This paradoxical man who is devoured by the terror of growing old, who studies himself minutely in looking-glasses and desperately notes every tiny wrinkle in the network at the corner of his eyes, is uneasy in the present and feverishly hurries Today on Tomorrow. I myself linger in the past, even if that past be only Yesterday, and I look back almost always with regret.”
This living in the past causes her even to forget that she now lives in this new apartment, coming out of her daydream, she readies herself to return home (to her father) only to realise she no longer lives there and ponders where her home really is.“To go home! But where? Isn’t this my home, then? No, no, it isn’t, and that’s the whole source of my trouble. To go home? Where? Definitely not to Rue Jacob, where Papa has piled up mountains of papers on my bed. Not to Montigny, because neither the beloved house…not the School…”
Her husband decides to re-initiate his “at-home day”, a day when society friends can call to visit, Claudine isn’t too enthusiastic, but agrees as long as she doesn’t have to be the hostess. It is here she will meet Rézi, a woman she is both charmed by and fearful of, one whom she becomes attached to, visiting her daily, encouraged by her husband.“Rézi… Her whole person gives off a scent of fern and iris, a respectable artless, rustic smell I find surprising and enchanting by contrast..”
Having achieved his objective in coming to Paris, to find his daughter a suitor, Claudine’s father announces he’s had enough of Paris and is returning to Montigny, and taking her cat Fanchette with him.
Claudine is drawn into the intoxicating intimacy of her friendship with Rézi, albeit somewhat bothered by the overly attentive encouragement of her husband.“The violence of Rézi’s attraction, the vanity of my resistance, the sense that I am behaving ridiculously, all urge me to get it over and done with; to intoxicate myself with her till I have exhausted her charm. But, I resist! And I despise myself for my own stubborn obstinacy.”
Their relationship plays itself out, up to the denouement, when Claudine seeking refuge decides to return to Montigny, to the safety of her childhood home, the woods, her animals whose loyalty she is assured of, and the affection of the maid Mélie and her humble, absent-minded father.
She writes a letter to her husband, the last pages arrive and we are on to the next book, in English entitled Claudine and Annie, in French Claudine s’en va, meaning Claudine Leaves! -
If you like Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, but particularly the parts where Anne Egerman and her maid Petra get into a pillowfight (look, this is a masterpiece of cinema, I promise) (also, it inspired A Little Night Music), and the pervading air of giddy lust masking the underlying sense of existential despair, then, well, I have a series of books for you.
Admittedly, the charm of the Claudine novels depreciates as they go on. There's something impressive about the artful, shameless, relentless eroticism of Claudine at School, as if Colette and Willy are throwing every schoolgirl cliché they can think of at you and seeing which will stick. It's certainly diverting, and Claudine is an entertaining guide to her own life. Claudine in Paris retains something of the ruthlessness of the first book, but is altogether more . . . swoony, and the transition isn't totally convincing. (There are foreshadowings of Gigi also, fwiw.) Claudine Married sounds the most ridiculous - in it Claudine does her best to consummate an affair with another woman and ropes her husband in to help, as you do - but strain shows at the edges. Claudine and Annie hands off to a new narrator, and is less than compelling.
Critically, there is a lot to mine, though. It's impossible to read these novels without thinking of The Second Sex, partly because Colette offered Beauvoir lots of illustrative examples, partly because watching Claudine grow up evokes the same journey Beauvoir discusses. And the kind of breathless, giddy, male-gaze-serving, wish-fulfilling, exhibitionism out of which the series originates is, well, rich ground for critical analysis.
But, really, there's no necessity about this series - they don't cry out to be read, diverting as they are. -
Woah this was delightful. Claudine at School was by far the best. Claudine is sassy and completely defies the moralistic/didactic image I have of early 1900s schoolgirls à la The Little Princess ... Claudine is basically the naughty version of The Little Princess. She openly cheats, steals her friends' love letters, listens in on private conversations through walls, tries to seduce the assistant headmistress, and on and on. There is one moment when the handsome superintendent comes in the classroom and reprimands Claudine for not plaiting her long, curly hair. Noticing she has dark circles under her eyes, he asks if she's getting enough sleep and if she has breathlessness and heart palpitations at night. She blushes despite herself. The subtlety is just excellent.
Another review put it aptly: "That French bitch is crazy. In, like, the best possible way." -
A charming, yet quick, collection of four novels written by Colette. I still like Colette's writing. It's not difficult like most of my favorite stuff, but it's rather simple and usually makes me smile. I would classify most of her stuff as romance. Either I'm getting soft or I'm just appreciating these types of stories more as I grow.
With Colette's Claudine books I think you have to know in order to fully enjoy them is the background history. Before Colette could claim these as her own, her first husband Willy put his name on them. Let's be honest here, I don't think it's very believable a man would write these books. Most parts it's kind of obvious a woman wrote them. After a long legal battle, Colette finally convinced them that she actually wrote the books and they would remove Willy's name from the credit altogether. Willy name suited him well considering he sounds like a dick. Learned this from Alan Moore's Lost Girls comic, but if it wasn't for my mom, I probably wouldn't even want to read Colette.
I think this book and her other books would appeal more to young women and women a like more, but if men are interested in romance fiction or want to learn about everyday France society fiction these are good books to read.
Keep in mind this isn't the complete Claudine either. There is one more book that my mom already has that I'll be reading next. I'm not sure why these edition doesn't include it, but at least I have it. Maybe they cut it out for page numbers or maybe it's because it was written a few years later after she left Willy. -
perhaps my favorite writer ever. little known here in the US, but truly beautiful writing.
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This is the stuff of a good life and a pleasurable mind.
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What one should realize with this series is that it is a record of Colette's writing maturing into its own. The first book is quite silly in spots, but those fairly naughty bits were added or enhanced by Colette's husband of the time, Henri Gauthier-Villiers, known as Willy. As the books go on, and Claudine moves to Paris, marries, and ages, you watch Colette not only shed Willy from her life, but also his influence on her writing. She becomes a brave and independent woman. Interesting to note that Claudine was quite a publicity sensation in Paris when she was introduced, resulting in Claudine cologne, a line of clothes and other Claudine items not unlike the merchandising that now accompanies a Disney film!
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This is a collection of four short novels of different quality. "Claudine at School" is addictive, disarmingly funny, voyeuristic and memorable. I've read dozens of novels about young Europeans in secondary school and this one immediately joined my two or three favorites. Claudine narrates in a wonderfully vain and devilish fashion: “After a few lively skirmishes, I have to admit that she is an unusually good Headmistress; decisive, often imperious, with a strength of purpose that would be admirably clear-sighted if it were not occasionally blinded by rage.” and “Anais, who had noticed him too, took to kicking up her skirts as she ran so as to exhibit legs which, however, were far from attractive, also to laughing and uttering bird-like cries. She would have acted flirtatiously in the presence of a plough ox.” Throughout the first book, Claudine seems like a much more adventurous, sadistic and sexed-up version of Emma. “Claudine at School” is a confection.
In “Claudine in Paris” the human backdrop is a bit more hastily drawn and less sympathetic than the winning young ladies from school in Montingy. The narrative is still lively; Claudine is still acerbic and amusing; but once this novel starts heading towards a particular marriage, it seems rather inevitable and slow about its business. Some might find Colette’s treatment of homosexuality in early 20th century Paris intriguing and others might enjoy her depiction of Paris’ socialite class in action; I found neither of these elements as interesting the passages more tightly focused on Claudine and the complications that she creates.
“Claudine Married” starts fantastically, “Definitely, there is something wrong with our married life. Renaud knows nothing about it yet; how should he know?” and is a return to the pace and quality of the first novel. The relationship dynamics in this third installment are wonderful fodder: a considerably older and distantly related paternal husband who wishes to be cuckolded by the potential lesbian love affairs of his little wife and who is decidedly aroused by a field trip to her alma mater. Colette carefully matures the tone of her heroine as her ability to read and understand the people around her improves. Throughout this novel Claudine continues to be gemstone perfect in her reflections and utterances: “My dear giant, whom I was distracting (without his grumbling) from virtuous industry, does not always understand the causes of what he calls ‘my shipwrecks.’” Or “Is your husband going to rise up out of the shadows again like an Anglo-Indian Satan?”
“Claudine and Anne” was a total disappointment. Despite devouring the first three books, I gave up on this one after about forty pages, skimmed the rest of it and decided it should have been excluded from the collection altogether. The narrative reigns have been handed to a considerably dimmer and more subservient young wife named Anne, whose thoughts are not unique or spicy enough to sustain a novel. The fact that we get to glimpse Claudine from this easily-scandalized dimwit’s point of view is a very small consolation and in fact, it is actually depressing to see Clauding reduced to a two dimensional, wise-cracking temptress. A reader would need to have been enjoying these books in a way totally removed from my own fashion to still take pleasure in the fourth book.
But who cares, books one and three are excellent. The all-pervading style and tone of them is too well-crafted to avoid. It is a treat to situate Colette’s work amongst other literature from the continent at that period; she adds breadth to her own moment in history.
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I have The Complete Claudine collection of 4 novellas, but I will only finish the first for now, Claudine at School. I enjoyed the outspoken, rebelliously playful Claudine. As a teenage student, Claudine feuds and flirts with her fully-grown teachers as well as delights the reader with charmingly critical observations about her surroundings. The part of the book I found to be lacking was a lack of plot or action. Perhaps this is the symptom of a first novel, which would make sense as Claudine at School is Collette's first; It began as a writing workshop project. I enjoyed the end more than the beginning, particularly Claudine's rambunctious last night of school. I don't know if I'll come back to this series, but I do know I'll never forget its main character. It's too bad there isn't more plot to motivate me to keep reading.
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One of my favorite books of all time
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I have read them very long time ago, when i was a teenager, the books are so romantic and i enjoyed them very much.
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This series is uniquely French and feminine. Colette offers a female answer to "Remembrance of Things Past". The books feature the headstrong and wickedly intelligent Claudine. We meet Claudine as she is entering her high school years. The school is a well regarded institution with a rigorous and well-rounded course load. Claudine discovers her first love with the eager-to-please, young school mistress Aimee. She finds a rival to Aimee's affections in the form of the head mistress Mademoiselle Sergent. Love affairs realized and unrequited are front-and-center throughout these introspective novels.
Claudine's school year highlights include a challenging academic competition, unwanted petting from the school doctor, a loving but disconnected relationship with her father, and the worshipful attention of a younger classmate. The stories are told with incredible detail and skill. There are many hilarious anecdotes. The open-minded and mischievous Claudine is the ideal vehicle to deliver the narratives.
The second book follows Claudine's post-graduation life in Paris. She leaves her beloved village Montigny with her father for the big city. In Paris, she becomes fast friends with her flamboyant cousin Marcel. He is a pretty young boy. Claudine and Marcel share a similar c'est la vie attitude combined with rebelliousness. Claudine also meets Marcel's playboy father Renaud. The 19-year-old Claudine is determined to seduce the 40-something Renaud. Although tempted by Claudine, Renaud demands they be married before any intimacy can take place. With the blessing of Claudine's father, they marry.
The third book depicts the married life of Claudine and Renaud. Claudine becomes enchanted with a young lady named Rezi. Rezi is in a loveless marriage and encourages Claudine's advances. Renaud, although jealous of Rezi, does not stand in the way of the two young ladies affections. He even enables their liaison. Despite this extramarital affair, the connection between Claudine and Renaud remains solid.
The final book is a departure from the first three. It is told from the point of view of Claudine's friend Annie. The book is the least interesting of the four. The advantage of the story told from Annie's point of view is that we can view Claudine from an outsider's eyes. She is as feisty, spirited, unconventional, and unapologetic as ever. Annie's husband is on a ship at sea, Annie occupies her time with her friends, including Claudine. Claudine questions Annie's marriage. Annie too begins to doubt the strength of her marital relationship.
These books are spectacular. Colette's honesty and fearlessness in offering a glimpse of her semi-autobiographical life, including scandalous affairs and lesbian relationships is breathtaking. Her skill in writing with meticulous and accurate details is equally impressive. Combining incredible dexterity with the written word and fascinating real-to-life characters, Colette is a master. I liked the Claudine books better than her more famous "Cheri". Claudine is an incredible woman, someone who embodies living life to the fullest. Intelligent and independent, Claudine is one of the great characters in literature. Colette clearly earns her claim as one of the best and most colorful authors of the 20th century. -
I'd give a 5-star rating to Claudine at School. I started Claudine in Paris, and it was still well-written but the story was not as interesting so I stopped reading it. So that's why the 4-stars overall. I did not look at the last two books.
Claudine is a vain, willful brat that I would hope never to meet in person, but she is absolutely delightful as a character and narrator. She is full of life and observes her fellows and elders with sharpness and humor. She likes to come off as worldly-wise to men, but in Claudine at School, her affections are directed mostly at the sly and pretty Aimee, the assistant teacher. Aimee’s head gets turned by the headmistress, however, and Claudine must settle for being amused at the pair’s indiscretion and sometimes neglectful management of the school.
Claudine is admired by the younger set – particularly Aimee’s little sister, Luce – and has varying levels of companionship with her own class. She likes to insult the “lanky” Anais, but Anais is probably the classmate almost Claudine’s equal in cleverness and perception.
I think I really love stories set in small schools in the past. I like seeing the push and pull between the schoolchildren who are stuck together year after year. My favorite parts in Claudine at School were when the classmates were thrown even closer together due to shared experiences, such as the Certificate exams in Claudine at School or preparing for a French official’s visit to town. I think I liked these parts because I liked seeing Claudine get caught up with the communal effort. She’s usually looking to be the individual at all times, but then there are these times where she clearly enjoys the place she has made for herself in her small community.
I also enjoyed reading a book about a teenager where her schoolwork is actually something noted and discussed alongside the interpersonal shenanigans. Take this wonderful little passage:
Only a fortnight till the Certificate! June oppresses us. We bake, half asleep, in the classrooms; we’re silent from listlessness: I’m too languid to keep my diary. And in this furnace heat, we still have to criticize the conduct of Louis XV, explain the role of the gastric juices in the process of digestion, sketch acanthus leaves and divide the auditory apparatus into the inner ear, the middle ear and the outer ear. There’s no justice on the earth! Louis XV did what he wanted to do, it’s nothing to do with me!
p. 112
I had thought I might read the complete Claudine (which in this anthology also includes Claudine in Paris, Claudine Married, and Claudine and Annie). However, after some pages into Claudine in Paris, I realized that I preferred her in the school setting. -
I've only read "Claudine at School" so far, but I definitely want to read the other three books. I absolutely LOVE this character. She's like a mischievous Lisa Simpson.
Claudine is a pretty, intelligent and very naughty French school girl around the turn of the 1900s. She lives in Montigny and the book is almost like a diary. The reader shares Claudine's point-of-view in her final year at school. She is fifteen at the start of the story and turns sixteen by the end. This book raised a bit of a scandal upon its release due to the lesbian themes within. Claudine, like Colette herself, was bisexual. It's entertaining and this character is the type of friend you love to have.
I will be adding a lengthier review at a later time. -
Claudine Married was by far the best of the books, in my opinion, with its depth of characters and their emotions. The prose throughout was beautiful, and it is wonderful to read the perspective of someone who sees the world and those who inhabit it in such a beautiful light.
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Man, this woman can write!! The school one was a little too long (enough about the school!) Enjoyed married one and Paris one as well. The Annie book fell apart at the end. So much sex, so much lesbianism! Have to say I was a little shocked (yeah, shocked!)
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Claudine has got to be one of the most memorable fictional character ever. Witty, cutting, hilarious, original, charming, outrageous. A pleasure to read all of these books.
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I recently decided to read some French classics that have fallen out of copyright and are therefore available on sites like Bouquineux. I’d heard that Colette was an enjoyable read but only remembered reading “Chéri” and not particularly enjoying it, though I can’t now remember why. So I decided to give the famous Claudine stories a go.
I have to say that on the whole, I didn’t enjoy them as much as I'd hoped. There are pleasing elements to them but I think, fundamentally, that times have changed, and high-spirited young girls can aspire to a more fulfilling life than was available to them in 1900. And post-#MeToo, a 40-year-old man with a teenage wife, cheating on her and perving on 10 to 15-year-olds as he offers them sweets is just not … what did Colette expect us to think? Endearing? Normal?
Anyway, I will steel my stomach and come back to that particular aspect later, and also note a weird parallel with a Zola novel I’m pretty sure Colette would have read before she wrote all this, and which puts an odd light on the whole thing. But first, some other comments on the novels, good and bad… spoilers ahead.
To be absolutely fair, I did find Claudine at school genuinely delightful and that’s why I’ve given the series any stars at all. I grew up in France and though my cosmopolitan Parisian environment was completely different, the academic education I received in the 1970s was not a million miles away from the one Colette recounts through Claudine. The style is light-hearted, easy to read (at least in the original French) with vivid descriptions of places, people and animals, and I can see why it was so popular. True, there’s a whole lesbian plot, and some shenanigans involving the schoolmasters at the boys’ school next door and the sleazy academy school inspector, all of it quite fun, and no doubt designed to titillate the 1900 audience, but what mainly came through was the sheer joy of being a child growing up wild and free in a world of boundless possibilities.
Obviously, knowing the time this was written in, and knowing that Colette’s own middle-aged husband, Willy, was directing her pen, I didn’t really expect Claudine to go off and have a fulfilling career which allowed her to grow into an independent adult and then settle down in a mutually-respectful, loving relationship. But damn, I didn’t think the author who painted such a good portrait of a happy, carefree child in the first book would subject her to what happens next.
In Claudine in Paris, Claudine, who has left school at 16 because the only alternative is to become a teacher, mopes about miserably in Paris with literally nothing to do. There are occasional flashes of the old Claudine, but to me, her misery at being uprooted from her beloved country village is the dominant feature of this book. She is 16, homesick, has no studies, no work, no hobbies, and no friends: just an emotionally distant father, a deranged elderly servant (reminiscent of Nursey in the BBC comedy Blackadder), and a gay, cross-dressing cousin, Marcel, who is slightly older than her, completely vacuous and not much of a friend. We’ll come back to the gay cousin and his family in a moment.
Claudine’s isolation is illustrated by her dwindling correspondence with her former childhood friends. One of them marries at 17 and most of her other schoolmates are on track to become spinsters (ie they’re pursuing their studies). The only one with an interesting outcome (if you can call it that) is her abused would-be lover Luce, who ran away from home at 16 and is now her 60-year-old uncle’s sex slave. We get the full details: her screaming so loud when he raped her that he had to bribe her to shut up, the schoolgirl outfit, the crawling on the floor naked while he pursues her "like a rutting bull". Light-hearted this is not. Claudine’s reaction is to smack the girl, blame her for what’s happened to her, and then run away and never talk to her again. Nice. In the next book, we discover that Claudine’s husband likes talking to her about Luce. Presumably his life goal is to have a little teenage sex slave of his own one day. Oh wait, never mind…
Well, actually, yes, let’s get to the husband. After a year or so of utter, soul-destroying boredom in Paris, the now 17-year-old Claudine apparently gets so bored that she decides she’s in love with Marcel’s 39-year-old father, Renaud. That’s the extent of the build-up. One minute, he’s just hovering on the sidelines, an ill-defined purveyor of indulgent smirks and theatre tickets whom she calls “uncle” because his late wife was her first cousin. Then it’s as if Colette suddenly decided, three-quarters of the way through writing the book, that it would be neat if it ended with Claudine getting married, and literally just picked the only established heterosexual male character to make it happen.
As a first date, Renaud gets Claudine drunk in a bistro and fondles her in the back of a cab. We get the strong feeling that Claudine literally just wants to have sex with him to get it over with. In fact, she literally says she doesn’t want to get married, and would just like to be his mistress, possibly on a temporary basis. Given the unconventional tone of the first book, I'll admit I actually had a glimmer of hope that they might leave it at that and Claudine might get to explore sex without the emotional baggage of a full-blown unequal relationship. But no, it’s 1900, so since Renaud also wants to have sex with her, he and her father agree to ignore her wishes, and she marries Renaud three weeks after the grope.
I’m struggling to believe that, even at the time, this was really seen as a great example of romance. It’s worth noting that Renaud at this point is also about as well defined as a stick figure. True, this is often a feature of romance novels, but I might have been more inclined to accept any of this if I got a sense of Renaud being worthy of Claudine. I ended the book knowing more about Claudine’s cat than I did about this man she’s supposedly in love with. Apparently, he has a greying moustache, smells of tobacco, and is a bit of a ladies’ man. And presumably fancies immature teenage girls younger than his son. A real catch.
To be fair, the next book, Claudine married does flesh out Renaud’s character a little. He goes from stick figure to full-on, moustache-twirling middle-aged pervert. The book opens with Claudine saying there’s something wrong with her marriage. Spoiler alert: there’s still something wrong with her marriage at the end of the book. She’s still in it.
Though she says she gets physical pleasure from it, the once confident Claudine finds sex with her middle-aged husband emotionally and physically overwhelming, saying that even after two years, intercourse reminds her of her school friend who used to stuff her fingers into gloves that were too small. I’m a fairly worldly middle-aged woman, but I think that image traumatised me a bit. I guess on the plus side, Colette doesn’t pretend there’s anything equal about this relationship: Claudine calls Renaud a “father husband” and uses the formal “vous” with him, as one does with a superior or an elder, while he calls her his “child” and says “tu” as you do with children. There’s some half-hearted talk of him being immature for his age, but that doesn’t really help.
They live in a world of constant travel, parties, and house visits, and Claudine is surrounded by a host of worldly characters who are her husband’s contemporaries. She still has literally nothing worthwhile to do. So she mopes about among her husband’s furniture, the clothes her husband buys her, and the people her husband introduces her to. Since one of Renaud’s favourite topics of conversation with his young wife is the sapphic schoolgirl life she lived only a couple of years ago, the couple goes to visit her old school, giving Renaud an opportunity to bribe a bunch of pubescent girls in nightdresses with sweets while his teenage wife looks on indulgently. Her thoughts during this scene are literally “ooh, he’s so handsome and manly, he’s totally seducing these little girls”. Evidently turned on by this display of hebephilia, Claudine decides to kiss and grope one of the 15-year-olds herself.
Following this, and with a great deal of nudge, nudge, wink, wink encouragement from her husband, Claudine starts a relationship with Rezi, a plump blonde who is married to an emotionally distant Englishman. I can’t remember if we’re told what age Rezi is but she isn’t a teenager. I don’t know if that makes it better or worse. Claudine angsts quite a lot about cheating on her husband, then about the fact that he seems to be encouraging her to do it, then about having a relationship with Rezi at all, then about how overwhelming the physical relationship is when it happens. Renaud helps her mental state massively by arranging a love nest for Claudine and Rezi, to which he has the only key, and prying for details from his now quite emotionally distressed young wife. Then to round things off, he has an affair with Rezi himself behind Claudine’s back.
I had another vain moment of hope when, having discovered his adultery, Claudine dumps the old sleaze and goes back to her childhood home. But her conclusion after roaming the countryside like she did as a child is that this is all her fault, and she begs her husband to come and get her. Apparently, it’s only slightly his fault for not being more firm with her and she basically says he needs to boss her around more so she can be a good wife. I guess Willy wrote that bit himself.
Through all this, Claudine comes across very much as still a child, flailing about helplessly as she drowns in the adult world she’s been plunged in straight from school, while her middle-aged husband pulls her further under with a pervy smirk. I’m genuinely not sure what Colette wanted us to feel about this, but it seems a sad outcome for the carefree, confident girl of the first book.
The next book is a jarring jump into someone else’s life. Annie, in love with her first cousin from the age of 12, ends up marrying him at 20, and lets him do everything. He runs the house, picks her clothes, forbids her from taking pain relief when she suffers crippling migraines, and treats her as a half-witted idiot. Annie fares somewhat better than Claudine, though. When her domineering husband goes away on a business trip, Annie mopes about in the same pointless existence as Claudine, but gradually gains independence. When her friends finally tell her that her husband has been cheating on her for years, Annie divorces him. See, Claudine, that’s how it’s done.
In that book, we are told several times that Renaud and Claudine are madly in love and have loads of sex. He apparently got the message about dominating Claudine, since he reads her mail before she opens it, and orders her to leave her friends mid-conversation when he feels like leaving a party. Then we’re told Renaud and Claudine are madly in love some more. Claudine advises Annie that if she really wants to divorce her cheating husband, she should accept all the blame for the separation. There's an underlying feeling that men are entitled to cheat on their wives and the wives should just put up with it. Just to round things up, Claudine tells Annie she's madly in love with Renaud.
Talking about Renaud and cheating husbands, any hope that Claudine’s off-screen reconciliation with Renaud at the end of Claudine married might have resulted in him, if not respecting her as a equal (since that ship sailed with the whole "father husband" thing), at least realising that she’s a human being who deserves a husband who is faithful to her, is dashed in the final book. A sentimental retreat, set ten years after their marriage, includes a flashback to another time - evidently not the only other time - where Renaud pursued some other woman while his wife is literally right there with them. Claudine, her self-respect evidently long gone, says on that occasion that she doesn’t even want to know if Renaud succeeded in bedding the woman. We get the feeling Claudine has not been allowed any such liberties with anyone.
That book is mainly centred on Claudine’s (platonic) relationship with Annie, who is punished for leaving her husband by becoming a nymphomaniac condemned to meaningless, loveless sexual encounters, including an attempt with Marcel of all people. It also features an almost entirely off-screen Renaud, now in his early 50s, who suddenly turns 70 overnight and then dies. It was written after Colette’s split with her own older perv, which might explain why she couldn't be bothered to actually include Renaud. It still ends with a twenty-something Claudine sleeping in the bed her husband died in, apparently intending to spend the rest of her life mourning him, and rambling about how much she loved him. I wish I knew why - I guess the conclusion is that if you’re an adult man and you marry a girl young enough, you can convince her to worship you forever? Perhaps there was more wishful thinking from Willy in this series than he’s usually given credit for.
If you’ve waded all the way to the end of all this, I’ll add something odd I noticed that amused me. Exasperated by the “romance” in Claudine, I decided to follow it up with some naturalism, thinking Zola’s gritty social justice would be an interesting change of tone. Imagine my surprise to find a similar set of characters in his 1871 novel, The Kill. This features Renée, married as a teenager to a man 21 years older than her, and her almost gay stepson Maxime, who is practically the same age as her, and bears a striking physical resemblance to Marcel in the Claudine stories. Zola stops short of making Maxime gay, though he does dress in women's clothing, as does Marcel. The outcomes are rather different, but there are definitely echoes in Claudine in Paris and Claudine married of Renée’s profound boredom with her marital life filled with her older husband’s affairs and friends. But at least Zola didn’t pretend that any of this was good. -
Colette's Claudine is one of the most mesmerizing characters I've ever read in a book--a young person of fierce passions and with all her senses almost unbearably alive. For Claudine, life in the turn-of-the-century French countryside, and then Paris, is vivid and strange, full of humor, sensuality, and quiet violence. This collection of the four Claudine novellas is a rare and blisteringly feminine classic.
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This cover actually made me do a lot of reading on Evelyn Nesbit/"the girl in the red velvet swing" and the whole turn of the century murder scandal. All these editions make me want to do visual research.
So, Colette. Claudine is too autobio and fake-sensual-giggly and "oh my petticoat ha ha!" autoerotic/demure for me. This was oddly fascinating to read, considering that. It's hard to believe that people thought like this before WWII ended the whole generational culture. It's also gigantic: four books. You can read this for a month of going to sleep as long as you remember to renew your library books. -
03/24/13 - So after almost two years, I'm moving this off my currently reading shelf. Eventually, I'll come back to the other Claudine stories.
07/16/11 - Claudine at School - 4 Stars.
Claudine is the perfect naughty French schoolgirl. She hits and kicks...wants everyone to love her, but doesn't give anything back...and the scandals! There's lesbian schoolteachers, creepy school Superintendents, proposals, break-ups, affairs... This book is not at all what I expected and I can't wait to see what Claudine gets up to in Paris. If she can be that bad in a small, country town then she's gonna get crazy in the big city. -
what i'm actually reading is 'claudine and annie'-- the last of the four stories-- a little pocket-sized penguin edition from the early seventies. the back cover says "feathery near-pornography', and that's about right, assuming an older and more quaint sense of the term. it's all very breathless!
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Ok, so I skimmed the last two books. But I still feel like I can say that Claudine at School is the best. By far. Also I have to warn you that this is not the best beach and/or travel reading, even if you've had it on your shelf for like six months and want the sweet satisfaction of finally having read (slash skimmed) it.
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Yet another book I picked up because I liked the cover. (Interesting sidenote, the photo on the cover, would turn out to be of Evelyn Nesbitt, whose heartbeaking biography I read last year.) This was my introduction to Colette, and I feel hard. Claudine is one of my favorite heroines, possible second only to Anne Shirley. These stories are so much fun.
