Claudine
Married now, and discovering that a wedding settled nothing about her desires — the cycle's heroine turning from comedy to hard experience.
A husband who will overrule her. She writes early on that she needs to respect and be a little afraid of what she loves, and the rest of the diary measures Renaud against that.
The book
At a glance
- The narrator; the whole novel is written as her diary
- Nineteen at the wedding, and the diary covers roughly the two years after it
- Montigny in the Fresnois, a country town of 1,847 people; the family house has a walnut tree, a wisteria and a rose that covers a whole wall
- Her father, a scholar of molluscs given to enormous swearing; Mélie, the family servant; Fanchette, her white cat. No mother appears in the book
- Renaud, a Paris writer of forty-five, and stepmother by that marriage to his son Marcel, who is about twenty
- By smell. Renaud offered her two apartments he already owned, and said he would find a third if neither suited; she sniffed both and took the one she preferred
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeClaudine is the young woman who narrates Colette's novel, and the novel is her diary. She grew up in Montigny, a country town of 1,847 people in the Fresnois, in a house with a walnut tree and a white cat, looked after by a servant and by a father who studies snails and shells and notices very little else. At the end of the previous book she became engaged to Renaud, a Paris writer old enough to be her father. This one opens six weeks after the couple have come back from fifteen months of travelling, with Claudine writing that something in the marriage is wrong and that her husband has not noticed.
She was nineteen at the wedding, after an engagement of three weeks. The book later gives Renaud's age as forty-five. She loves him, says so constantly, and is completely candid about how much she likes going to bed with him. The complaint she keeps circling back to is that he agrees with her about everything. She wants a husband who will occasionally tell her no, and she has one who buys her sable, laughs at her jokes and hands her whatever she asks for on the day she asks.
The other thing wrong is that she is homesick. Married life in Paris means first nights, dinners, and other people's drawing rooms, and she is bored and rude in most of them. What she misses is a village, a garden and a cat, and she says so often enough that Renaud starts promising to take her back there.
How the book draws them
- Nineteen, and married in a hurryThe engagement lasted three weeks. Claudine refused to help with any of the arrangements, on the grounds that she resented having to inform a mayor and a priest of her decision to live with Renaud. She spent the morning of the wedding complaining about the chocolate, the train of her dress, and the guests who were about to arrive.
- Her father forgets the weddingTen minutes before noon on the day, Claudine's father was found still in his dressing gown, smoking his pipe. He greeted his secretary by saying he was late and that they had a hard chapter ahead of them. Told that the wedding party was waiting, he checked his watch instead of the calendar, asked whether it was really today, and suggested they start without him.
- She undresses herselfOn the wedding night Renaud reaches for the fastening of her blouse and she jumps away and insists on doing it alone. She scatters her clothes round the room, announces that she is finished, and then loses her nerve under his stare and bolts for the bed. He stays fully dressed and uses only his hands and his mouth; he undresses afterwards, and laughs at her.
- She calls her husband vousFrench has a familiar word for you and a formal one. Claudine uses the formal vous to Renaud at every hour of the day, including in bed, and never manages the familiar tu. She decides that coming from someone as blunt and familiar as she is, the formality is itself a kind of caress.
- Her hair, and what Paris makes of itClaudine wears her hair cut short, which is enough to make her a subject at parties in 1902. She overhears the guests deciding that she is too dark, that the hair is a bid for attention, and that she must therefore be interested in women. Her own note on the reasoning is that a woman who is cold to men must, in their arithmetic, be after women instead.
- Kissing a schoolgirl on the stairsBack at her old school in Montigny for a night, Claudine flirts with the boarders and is put up in the assistant mistress's room. Leaving the next day, she kisses one of them, Hélène, a girl of fourteen or fifteen, on the landing. She admits in the diary that what she was kissing was the ghost of Luce, the schoolmate who loved her and whose tenderness she says she treated badly.
- The afternoon she puts her hat on to go homeTwo months into the new apartment she sits alone in the drawing room, loses track of the hour, gets up and starts pinning on her hat to go home. She is at home. She calls the moment a collapse: she has no house of her own, only lodgings with a man she loves.
- She tells the Louvre what she thinks of RubensA Spanish sculptor at one of Renaud's parties is so appalled that she has never seen the Rubens paintings, and has no wish to, that he stands up, bows and calls her a pig. She goes to the Louvre, gives them a solid half hour of honest effort, and concludes that they are meat. On the same visit she falls hard for a portrait of a young man by Bronzino and calls it an aesthetic adultery.
- What she counts as viceArguing with Renaud in the dark, she works out a definition and states it flatly: vice is harm done without pleasure. Taking a lover you want is, by her reckoning, ordinary natural law. Taking one you do not want, because you know it is wrong, is the offence.
- She does not love RéziMonths into the affair she writes it down plainly: she does not love Rézi. She can imagine the woman flattened by a car without flinching. What she cannot stand is imagining Rézi's mouth given to somebody else, and she notes that the jealousy hurts exactly as much as love would.
Three weeks of influenza keep Claudine indoors. On the first afternoon she gets out of the house she walks, without deciding to, towards the rue Gœthe, and sees the curtain move at the second-floor window. Renaud opens the door fully dressed. Rézi is in the bedroom in her corset and drawers with her hat already on. Claudine finds she cannot do any of the things a wronged wife is supposed to do: in books, she thinks, the woman fires two shots at the minimum, or leaves a crushing sentence behind her. She walks at Rézi until Rézi backs out through the curtain and is gone, and then runs, from Renaud and from herself.
She takes a cab home, throws her key on a table, picks up her travelling bag and catches a train to Montigny. She wires her father, and wires Renaud to send clothes and linen for an indefinite stay. Four days of her childhood bedroom, the garden, the walnut tree and the cat do most of the work. Renaud writes twice without excusing himself and without mentioning Rézi. The trunk he sends contains her ruby, her sweets in a silver-gilt box, and a letter rolled up inside one of her slippers.
Her reply is the last page of the novel. She apologises for leaving and thanks him for letting her go. She tells him she wanted Rézi and that he handed her over like a sweet, that he must learn to refuse her things, and that she is not coming back to Paris. She asks him to come to Montigny instead and stay. The last line tells him she has just spent four days waiting for him to stop being too young for her.