Claudine

Colette's husband locked her in a room each afternoon until she filled the pages, then published the result under his own name, and for thirty years Claudine belonged, on paper, to a man who never wrote a word of her. What Paris devoured behind that name was fifteen-year-old Claudine herself: sharp-tongued, hair cropped short and boyish, roaming the schoolyard at Montigny in open pursuit of the classmates she loves and torments by turns, and of Mademoiselle Sergent, the headmistress she watches with an appetite she never once disguises.