Meanwhile Aimee may or may not be engaging in assignations with one or both of the male instructors. That’s about as exciting as the story gets.Ĭlaudine falls madly in love with the headmistress’ assistant, Aimee, and after some impassioned kisses she is crushed when Aimee throws her over for the headmistress herself. In a very funny chapter, the girls must prepare an exhibition of their skills, including sewing and needlework on chemises, and the boys at the boy’s school come over to the exhibition just to see the underwear. Her day-to-day life is marked by observations about herself and her fellow students – their obsessions with chewing on things (do they all have pica?), getting ahold of candy, the scandal of Claudine wearing tall socks instead of stockings, and preparations for final exams. He sends her to the village day school because boarding school makes her feel penned in, a sensation she cannot stand. Claudine is a young woman whose father, a widower, is fond of her but totally obsessed by his study of snails.

When it came out, the book was scandalous for its descriptions of the physical and emotional passions of the teenagers, but by modern standards it’s quite tame. I was inspired to read this book because of the movie Colette which is in limited release as of September 21. You could boil this review down to “pretty words are pretty” and not lose much. The book is funny and charming but not the kind of book in which very much happens. There’s no plot at all, although there’s suspense about final exams and constant gossip about who is having a relationship with whom. It’s told in first-person, as diary entries. Claudine at School is a book from 1900 about Claudine, a fifteen-year-old girl living in rural France, and her time at school.

Claudine at School by Colette