Claudine in Colette’s Claudine novels
I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.
COLETTE
Paris in the 1890s was a hub of excess, a steaming hothouse where anything could happen. It was a society that fed on scandal, cultivated ugliness, stringing together love affairs and louche acts like so many pearls. It was the last place you’d expect to find Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, but there she was, a child among adults, bored and petulant, barely older than a schoolgirl and still sporting a schoolgirl’s knee-length braids. Not exactly a heroine you’d pay any attention to once you met her husband, Willy, a man who defined charisma in a charismatic time.
Gabri, as the young wife was known, had a frank provincial accent that stuck in the ears of her new Parisian consorts like burrs in silk. She seemed—and felt—more suited for climbing trees or hiking through the woods than lounging in the stultified, corseted atmosphere of the sitting rooms Willy loved to take her to. A rake, a lecher, a womanizer, and a windbag, Henry “Willy” Gauthier-Villars had an appeal that far outweighed his many weaknesses: Willy was famous, and rabidly so. He had established his reputation as a writer skewering the music of the day and was known for his excessive appetites for food, money, and women. This was a man whose last mistress had committed suicide after bearing his bastard child, a child Willy’s parents were eager to dispose of and whom they encouraged Willy to send to sleepy Burgundy to nurse. It’s there that he met the Colettes and their seventeen-year-old daughter; before he knew it, he was held captive by her youthful sexuality and her stunning beauty. He would gain nothing by marrying an obscure, dowryless country girl fourteen years his junior, but once he realized that marriage meant he could have her whenever he wanted, he married her all the same.
Gabri herself was more than charmed. She became obsessed with Willy’s cravings and the licentious, over-the-top personality that challenged everything her sheltered childhood had taught her. She got to know him a little better during their two-year engagement, but nothing could prepare her for the day in May 1893 when the new wife finally made fin de siècle Paris, in all its tawdry, overdressed glory, her home. Only then did she realize that Willy “specialized” in tomboyish women much younger than himself, women he courted extravagantly and jilted viciously. He enjoyed putting Gabri on display in polite society while he indulged himself in other women’s bedrooms. She learned about these affairs first through rumor and anonymous letters, then from chance meetings with her rivals. To a more seasoned woman, one versed in the languid sexuality of bohemian-meets-bourgeois Paris, Willy’s flirtations would have seemed harmless. But to Gabri, they were a betrayal.
Caught between a sort of languid love prison and her own growing restlessness, Gabri began to experiment. She didn’t dare to take her own lovers (yet), but she could push the envelope in other ways, playing her trophy role to the hilt, daring to wear a boy’s sailor suit to social events and reveling in the raised eyebrows and shocked praise of her hosts. She began to collect a shamelessly bohemian group of friends, dramatic and theatrical individuals who challenged social mores. She embraced gay men and demimondaines alike, gathering them around her with her increasingly famous stories of racy schoolgirl life. But even as she tested the boundaries of a stifling social order, her ties to her increasingly money-hungry husband grew stronger. Now she fulfilled the dual role of wife and secretary, handling his correspondence and eventually helping pen his essays.
History does not record whether Gabri (who had begun to tinker with the simple moniker Colette) or Willy first came up with the idea of writing down her schoolgirl stories, but soon enough she was embroiled in a full-scale literary project. It was understood from the start that the work was Willy’s. After all, his was the famous name, and he regularly indulged in the very du jour practice of employing a stable of ghostwriters whose toil was rewarded by a cut of the royalties—once they agreed to let Willy claim their work as his own. The deal was simple—the writers did the dirty work, Willy took the credit. Why on earth should his arrangement with his wife be any different?
But Willy could have no way of knowing that his young wife was pulling off something quite extraordinary. More impressive than her newfound diligence was the personage her book allowed her to meet, then admire: herself. “I have discovered an astonishing young girl,” she told Olympe Terrain in 1896. “Do you know who she is? She’s exactly me before my marriage.”
“She” is Claudine, the autobiographical heroine of the series that bears her name: a self-portrait of the artist as a restless, sexually frustrated teenager whose extravagance is as boundless as her potential for pleasure. We get the first glimpses of Colette’s indulgent future in her first book, Claudine at School. Trapped in an inferior school in an obscure provincial French town, Claudine is determined to poke holes in anything and everything, even as she restlessly searches for something to fill up the discomfort that has arisen during her teenage years. There are plenty of distractions while she searches for answers: the drowsy town of Montigny is full of ridiculous, atrociously human characters whose weaknesses Claudine can’t resist. School bores and shackles her, but it’s not without its charms. There are teachers to lambaste, rules to break, books to mangle, lessons to learn, and students to mock and beat. More appealingly, there are relationships to observe, tease, and secretly long for. Like her little cat Fanchette, Claudine is a sensual creature at heart, flexing and stretching and prowling around in search of someone to scratch her… or someone to scratch.
“You’re called Claudine, aren’t you?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Oh, you’ve been ‘talked of’ for quite a time…. Our mistresses used to say about you: ‘She’s an intelligent girl but as impudent as a cock-sparrow and her tomboyishness and the way she does her hair set a very bad example’… they say you’re crazy and more than a bit eccentric.”
“Charming women, your teachers! But they’re more interested in me than I am in them. So tell them they’re only a pack of old maids who are furious because they’re running to seed. Tell them that from me, will you?”
Scandalized, she said no more.
Petulant and self-centered, bored and all too aware of her own foolishness, Claudine is a shockingly modern heroine for one who lives in turn-of-the-century France. Constantly on the lookout for diversion and scandal, she creates her own if need be. She compares her breasts to those of her friends, mocking their bodies even as she marvels at her own. She listens hard to adult conversations not fit for childish ears and retaliates against grown-up doubts by acting willfully immature. When forced to look after the younger students at school, she makes them transcribe ridiculous tripe. She refuses to subdue her luxurious hair or behave for the school superintendent, whose licentious looks both thrill and scare her. Disregarding the strict expectations of her era, she leaves school when she pleases, opting instead for long walks through pungent French forests and lazy days at home.
In Claudine’s indulgences, we see a bit of the author’s own suppressed fervor for life: Claudine knows how to act in society, but chooses to push boundaries and press buttons at every turn. Hyperaware of her own body, she sets out to see how far she can go, whipping others into an erotic frenzy, then acting the chaste schoolgirl again. And, like any teenager, she realizes that her world is becoming too small to contain her. In a passage that is reminiscent of the coming-of-age chapters in which Francie Nolan realizes that her once-luminous world is cracked and chintzy, Claudine rues her sterile new school and the loss of her childish memories and interests:
Is it because I’m getting older? Can I be feeling the weight of the sixteen years I’ve nearly attained? That really would be too idiotic for words.
Claudine’s indulgence isn’t confined to the schoolroom; she falls in love as spectacularly as she flouts convention in school. She doesn’t just love, she declares it, after a deliciously drunken night with an older man. She throws herself into marriage and then into sadness, feeling the precariousness of her position as a societal curiosity and a baby bride. And she abandons herself to a passionate love affair with another woman with the blessing of a husband she wishes would object. For Claudine, this outrageous approach to her personal affairs isn’t just a means of shocking and gaining attention: it is a declaration of independence in a culture still governed by the corset and the chattel marriage contract, a hypocritical world of appearances and one that gladly overlooks infidelity and abuse as just another side of drawing-room life. It’s hard to understand just how torn about city life Colette herself felt until we read about Claudine’s struggle to feel at home in her own skin in a controlled, stifling urban setting. And it is possible that Colette didn’t understand just how imprisoned she felt before she wrote about it.
Not that the results of her scandalous reminiscences weren’t a success. Claudine at School was the runaway best seller of 1900. Though Willy initially dismissed the work as childish, yet charming, he reread it and saw a glimmer of his wife’s talents… and of the pile of money he stood to earn. His name appeared on the cover, and Claudine appeared in the drawing rooms of scandalized Paris, whose inhabitants were as intrigued as shocked by the book’s frank expressions of sexual longing and disruptive female behavior. How could a book supported by Willy’s marketing genius and his wife’s teasing, racy voice be anything but a success?
But Colette’s triumph was her own prison sentence. The girl who had once longed for sensual domination now found the country house in which Willy sequestered her as a kind of glorified literary slave a bit more than she had bargained for. Worried about money, Willy prodded her to make her next books even more scandalous and titillating. She complied, writing five Claudine novels, two hugely successful plays, and two other books under Willy’s name. Isolated and dominated, Colette was a good worker and an assiduous writer. Soon the books became a kind of dialogue in which Colette narrated the ups and downs of her increasingly complicated marriage to Willy, even using her scandalous attachment to a woman named Georgie as fodder for Claudine Married. The book was almost banned for its racy content, but not before Colette discovered that Georgie had been bedding Willy, too.
Colette was stunned, both by her lover’s unfaithfulness and her husband’s. But there wasn’t much time to mourn other people’s flaws when her own literary daughter had become so unruly. The Claudine novels weren’t just popular, they were a phenomenon. Wherever she went, Colette could see mountains of Claudine-branded merchandise… and hear whispers about the true authorship of the books. Colette herself was suddenly famous, and she found herself in an increasingly awkward position. Willy now celebrated her androgyny, encouraging her to wear scandalous clothing and insisting on making creepy in-public appearances flanked by his wife and Polaire, a gamine actress who created the Claudine role on the stage. Willy treated them like twin dolls, fondly calling them his “daughters” and, it is to be assumed, bedding them both. Colette played along, but not without a sense of betrayal.
For me, Colette’s next move overshadows her more famous future escapades. Sure, she went on to do her time in the theater, where her bare-breasted, passionate kiss with her then-lover, the cross-dressing Mathilde “Missy” de Morny, the marquise of Belboeuf, led to a full-blown art riot. She seduced her sixteen-year-old stepson, engaged in indulgent collaboration with the Vichy regime, even outrageously neglected a daughter who would forever be overshadowed by her famous mother. These moves were all classic Colette, but they could never have happened if it weren’t for the stand she took when it came to her first published works. This rebellion started in a social setting, where Colette’s frank raconteurism and untutored accent gave away her outsider status. It spilled over into a series of books in which lust and love are turned out at the seams, torn apart, and cobbled back together again in outlandish fashion. And it ended up practiced inside the formerly private confines of a marriage whose shelf life was up and whose inner life she no longer bothered to obscure.
In the end, it wasn’t the indiscretions or sleaze that got to Colette. It was the sight of Willy, that infamous dilettante and faux celebrity, co-opting her childhood and her heroine and claiming them as his own. Finally free from the bonds of her first, all-encompassing love and straining under the expectations of a society that neither appreciated nor sustained her, it was time to stake a claim to her most indulgent creation: herself. The details of Colette’s battle to get her name on her own literary works could fill their own book. Aware he was being made to look a fool, Willy fought hard for the character he had encouraged and fostered. But the details don’t matter much. What counts is that Colette finally fought for her name, gambling on behalf of her heroine and her legendary personal identity.
Must a heroine engage in legal battles, seduce her husband’s lover, or mock the very foundations of society in the name of self-indulgence? I think not. After all, Claudine and Colette’s most over-the-top moments were personal ones. Claudine is as extravagant and self-indulgent walking alone through the streets of Paris in search of the country life and the childhood she’s lost as when she’s brilliantly drunk on sparkling wine. That daring leads her to eavesdropping and ill-timed outbursts, failed affairs and forbidden ones, and we are left with the feeling that while surely there’s a time and a place for self-restraint, love and self-respect are no place for the bit and the reins.
In a media landscape so cluttered with ego and false courage, it’s hard to find true extravagance among the poseurs. Colette would have laughed at and loved our Madonnas and Lady Gagas, with their provocative commitment to pushing the envelope for scandal’s sake. True self-indulgence becomes even more challenging as we are encouraged to think small, curl up, and protect ourselves in response to scary social and financial forces. Austerity is the code word du jour, but is a heroine really served by constant calculation and levelheadedness? The knack must be in finding some kind of balance between outrageous action and cautious thought. Elusive and often out of reach, balance is a skill neither Claudine nor Colette ever really mastered.
There’s something so fresh and appealing about Claudine’s imperfections that it becomes easier to tolerate my own. After all, aren’t the qualities that make Claudine so human precisely the ones that move her toward happiness? It would be different if she were all play and no seriousness, but Colette made sure to give her heroine a heart that restlessly seeks love and recognition and a head that knows when she’s gone too far. For women who will never be chastened for refusing to properly restrain our feminine hair or for daring to enjoy ourselves in bed, it can be hard to remember that Claudine’s small indulgences were important ones. The Paris of Colette’s day was resolutely libertine, but it was also one in which wives still belonged to their husbands and daughters to their fathers. Claudine and Colette’s insistence on enjoying themselves takes on even more significance when we stop to consider how hard that may have been to accomplish. And Colette’s claim to the literary credit she deserved was just as daring as her most profligate romantic feats.
I’ll admit it, after I discovered the Claudine novels I walked around with a sly new sense of possibility, a desire to push up against the boundaries I don’t always acknowledge around me. I may not have wanted to go out and seduce someone inappropriate, but I definitely wanted to pause and enjoy my body and my mind, to seek out pleasure for a moment even in an unpleasant time. Part of the power of Colette is her insistence that, no matter how doomed a love affair or hopelessly cloistered a life, an indulgent enjoyment of what pleasure we can create for ourselves is our right and our due. That’s something a heroine can carry around with her even if she knows she’ll be credited with every word she writes. Informed by the spirit, if not the letter, of Claudine’s teenage rebellion, a heroine can claim what’s hers, no matter who tells her it’s off-limits. And she can take a Colette-like pleasure in kicking life’s Willys to the curb.
We remember Colette as one of life’s more indulgent figures not because she shied away from her due, but because she pursued it even when life threw heartbreak, intrigue, infidelity, lost love, and war in her path. Any heroine on the verge of claiming that life for herself will be accompanied by Colette and outrageous Claudine. After all, aren’t heroines called upon to rise higher than the petty concerns that threaten to tether them? Is it even possible to author a life as deliciously scandalous as theirs? I, for one, would love to find out.
READ THIS BOOK:
• When you’re as nervous and claustrophobic as a country cat forced to live in a small city apartment
• When you tire of changing your hairstyle as a mode of rebellion and are looking for some daring inspiration
• Over café au lait and a croissant at your favorite coffee shop
CLAUDINE’S LITERARY SISTERS:
• Linda Radlett in The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford
• Nancy Astley in Tipping the Velvet, by Sarah Waters
• The nameless main character of The Lover, by Marguerite Duras