It had been a long time since I'd had anything to do with French author Colette. Back in the early 80s, because she sounded like someone I ought to try, and because the Penguin editions had lovely covers, I read, in English translation, The Vagabond and Chance Acquaintances. Little stuck in my mind.

In the early 90s, I acquired another couple, Le ble en herbe and La fin de Cheri (in the original language this time, as part of my great Pursuit of French). My diary has quite a lot about the evocative qualities of the first of these, which obviously proved powerful enough to overcome the distractions of my workplace on wintry lunchtimes, when I snatched time to read.

Anyway, Colette resurfaced in my life a couple of months ago as the eponymous heroine of Wash Westmoreland's 2018 film. It was enjoyable, deservedly garnering accolades such as "exhilarating, funny, inspiring", and plaudits for Keira Knightley, who plays the lead role, and was indeed in "top form".

Watching the movie, I realized I had known nothing about Colette's life, which truly is "too big for film". And I was struck, reading the reviews, how readily commentators' attention also wandered from the movie to the truly extraordinary career of the author herself.  

I'm currently listening to Judith Thurman's excellent 1999 biography, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, so I'll withhold any general discussion of her personal history until I'm done with that.

Instead, I'll focus on her first novel, Claudine a l'ecole (Claudine at School), the genesis of which seems to be pretty accurately portrayed in the movie (but see also the caveat here).

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873 in the Burgundy village of Saint-Sauveur en Puisaye,  about half-way between Paris and Lyon. At the age of 20, she married Henry Gauthier-Villars, almost 14 years her senior. He was not much of a writer in his own right, but he maintained a stable of very active ghostwriters, whose work he published under the pen name Willy.

In due course, his wife joined the team. He encouraged her to write about her schooldays, and although he initially cast aside the manuscript she came up with, he later decided to run with it. Claudine at School, ostensibly by "Willy", appeared in 1900, and became a huge hit. As this Time review of the English translation (1957) explains, it not only ran to numerous editions, but also -- partly because of Willy's genius for marketing -- "became so much a byword that manufacturers flooded Paris with a Lotion Claudine, a Chapeau Claudine, a Glace-Claudine and a Parfum de Claudine". With Claudine, as Thurman puts it, Colette had created the 20th century's "first teenage girl".

In the following three years, Colette penned a further three Claudine novels, which enjoyed unabated popularity, and sprouted offshoots in theatres and music halls (even in 1935 Colette reports receiving letters from haberdashers offering collar styles named after the books...).

Eventually, Colette's name was also permitted to appear on the cover alongside her husband's, but publishers wouldn't remove Willy's entirely until after his death in 1931.


Chateau de Labessiere, Ancemont, France, 1993

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Claudine at School, but it's an easy French read, and I found it increasingly intriguing.

Saint-Sauveur en Puisaye becomes Montigny, which the 15-year-old heroine and narrator describes with great fondness. The school environment is largely Colette's own (some of the characters' stories are purely fictional, some are caricatures of people she knew in the village). But unlike Colette, Claudine is presented as very much alone. There is no mother on the scene, and her father is engrossed in the study of slugs. So she's left to run wild. By the end, although she's still very much a tomboy, she's reached the point of wanting to have someone to love (or be in love with). 

Claudine is a great character. Intelligent, utterly indomitable, and insatiably curious (she has a wide range of strategies for finding out what she wants to know about the people around her), she's also pert, precocious, bossy, and quite nasty at times. She announces at one point: "You can't please everybody else and yourself. I prefer to please myself first." But she loves nature, loves books, and loves her cat... And she makes an engaging and amusing storyteller. Her little observational asides often made me laugh. 

I enjoyed the second half of the book (in which the girls go for their examination, and then the school and town frantically -- and very comically -- prepare for the visit of the Big Cheese) better than the first half (where we tend to go round in circles a bit with who loves whom, and who's jealous of whom). 

But the real interest of the book for me was that it is such a fascinating little period piece. Two elements in particular sent me scurrying off to find more context: girls' education, and same-sex relationships.



First, the school. Claudine builds up an interesting composite of the curriculum (pretty much all rote learning, except for "performed" subjects like music, needlework, and art, which are also set about with so many rules that genuine creativity would be difficult); the ethos of that study (it's the appearance of learning that matters rather than any genuine education endeavour); the communication styles and behaviour the girls displayed towards each other (and for sure, my friends and I, at 15, were not nearly so acerbic and astringent -- nor so violent...); and the socioeconomic background (because of parental negligence, Claudine is somewhat out of place, the only representative of her social class among a population of students from trading or farming families). 

Given that Claudine's birth year was 1884, and she's 15 in the novel, the year we are focusing on is 1899, less than two decades since, as Clark explains, the Ferry Laws (named after their sponsor, premier and education minister Jules Ferry) made public primary schooling free, secular, and obligatory for all children from six to thirteen.

The "secular" bit is important, as the church had previously played an important role in girls' education, and the policy-makers of the Third Republic wanted to reduce its influence. As far as girls' education was concerned, the Ferry Laws were an attempt to make up for decades of neglect (female illiteracy rates in 1880 were 25%, as against 16% for men, and girls at primary school were more likely to be taught by nuns than boys were to be taught by "teaching brothers", and those nuns were less likely to be qualified to teach than their male counterparts).

More schools for girls required the training of a body of secular female teachers. For young women, deprived of most other professional opportunities, the prospect of training to be a primary school teacher seemed very appealing, and we see this among Claudine's contemporaries. Colette is very clear about the disadvantages of this career, however, and contemporary testimony, according to Blin, does indeed show that young female teachers were in "a perpetual state of terror" on account of the many different interests they were expected to please. Young teachers were often not prepared for the hostile curiosity of communities that at root would have preferred their girls' teachers to be nuns. Equally, staff often attracted the attention of predatory male power-holders in the community. The material rewards were not great either (an assistant teacher would have been financially no better off than a laundress of the era).



The school-life that Claudine recalls is a long way from the ideal the policy-makers probably envisaged. She delights in dishing up the details of a quite remarkable degree of disorder, ranging from staff neglect of the students, connivance at plagiarism during the exams, and inappropriate reading habits, right through to sexual harassment on multiple levels... Blin comments that champions of lay education saw the book as playing into the hands of religious critics. Parisian clerics, meanwhile, were torn between a told-you-so satisfaction at the apparently shocking state of lay education, and indignation at the publication of such "immorality".

When Willy encouraged Colette to write down her memories of schooldays, he told her not to be afraid to add "spicy details". Following this instruction, and falling in with the often prurient nature of teenagers, she includes plenty of gossip, scandal, and innuendo, and almost certainly this is part of what explains the wildly enthusiastic reception of the Claudine series. Technically innocent (anything that "happens" does so off-stage), Claudine at School nevertheless radiates a sort of titillation that reminded me of British TV in the 1970s.

Still, the same-sex relationships the story depicts are intriguing. Claudine's feelings for Aimee Lanthenay, the assistant teacher, might conceivably be construed as a schoolgirl pash. But we're certainly encouraged to think that the bond between Mlle Sergent, the headmistress, and Aimee is the real thing (although neither is oblivious to the charms and/or pressures exerted by various male characters). Furthermore, Mlle Sergent makes it clear to Claudine that she could have been a "favourite" if she'd played her cards right. 

For all its sometimes wearying double-entendre, and its -- to us incomprehensible and concerning -- refusal to call out the power-discrepancies at work in all these relationships, there's nevertheless a kind of naturalness about their depiction that is refreshing. As that early Time review puts it, for Claudine "adult behaviour is neither good nor evil. It is just continuously absorbing, as the sex life of a lemming might be to a biologist."

This offers a useful contrast to the context of its time. According to Martin, the period of the French Third Republic witnessed a veritable explosion of representations of female same-sex relationships. He attributes this partly to a literary and philosophical inclination to rethink sexualities, but partly, and more darkly, to prevailing socio-political anxieties that were looking for scapegoat figures. In many of these works (by men) the portrayal of lesbian women is highly derogatory, and tied in with racist and anti-Semitic themes.

The Claudine novels, by contrast, he argues, attest to a very fluid understanding of sexuality: "She naturalizes same-sex attraction among women as something that is practically normative or commonplace... Even though Colette's depiction of lesbianism in her Claudines almost never completely removes the female characters that are attracted to women from the heteronormative sexual economy, she does carve out a place for same-sex attraction that is neither pathologized nor condemned."

So this was an unexpectedly interesting excursion. And as I'm not finished with Colette, there'll be more soon...


Colette's grave, Pere Lachaise, Paris, 2019