Chevalier of the Legion d’honneur, first woman in the Academie Goncourt, acquaintance of Proust and Cocteau, novelist, a vaudeville star who caused riots at the Moulin Rouge, seducer of stepsons, women and the famous, married three times - once to a Jew while befriending the Nazi elite in occupied Paris - it is said that Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, country girl made good, was locked in her room by her first husband, a notorious critic and dilettante fifteen years her senior, until she had produced enough pages of the Claudine novels for him to publish them under his own name.

While virtually unknown in the Anglophone world, Claudine the naughty schoolgirl caused sensations when she appeared on French bookshelves in 1900. The books were swiftly followed by Claudine plays, soaps, cigars and even uniforms. Claudine in Paris is the second in the series and one of Colette’s earliest works and, like much of her writing it dips liberally into autobiography, from the nostalgic descriptions of an unkempt rural life to its portrait of the shady Paris underworld littered with mistresses, rich 'uncles', artists, pompous critics, transvesites, beautiful queers, dominant femmes and, overriding all, the fierce sensuality of a woman in love.

The story begins with Claudine now seventeen and 'like an uprooted tree' recovering from illness in Paris where the household has moved to allow Claudine's absentminded Malacologist father to better pursue his study of slugs. With Melie the cook weighing her breasts and plying Claudine's cat Fanchette with local toms, the heroine wavers between childhood and a growing restlessness, a need for something 'far, far more than a husband'. The answer appears to come first in the shape of her cousin Marcel and then of his womanizing father Renaud, 'a father, a friend, a master, a lover', alongside encounters with her old sweetheart Luce, now a kept woman and a dawning realization that despite her claims to well-read worldliness and sophistication, 'when it comes to… a little friend living what I’m in the habit of reading about, I’m knocked sideways.'

What is most startling about this particular episode in Claudine's life is the unease and uncertainty felt by the heretofore arrogant protagonist. Once a big fish in a small pond, she flounders in the great wide world. This is one of those rare things; an intelligent book about being a girl, amused and unsentimental in its depiction of society and dealing with the same disgusts and delusions we have today. 'No novelist', stated Margaret Wallace in the New York Times in 1935, 'excels Colette in the sinuous and effortless analysis of an emotion, in the delicate rendering of a mood', and here she brings the constant fluctuations of a confused and driftless young adult sharply to the fore.

Despite criticism that she pandered to male fantasy, Colette faithfully describes the female experience, cutting through trite romance or teasing porn with, in Wallace's words, her 'subtlety and sharply barbed feminine wit'. Reality is her muse as she describes the schoolgirls' interest in cesspools and toilets, their laughter at Luce's fat old patron chasing her on all fours and their revulsion at the sweating corpulence of a man's lust. Rotting bananas, barley sugar, cat faeces, pearl and crepe de chignon cravats, the first kiss, Asti Spumanti and opera merge into a single wash of experience, of sensation, of discovery and being.

And meanwhile amidst this chaos, Claudine the school bully learns what it is to desire a man as an adult woman, and not only to submit but actively to want to. 'My liberty oppressed me', she cries, 'my independence exhausted me... Free women are no women at all.' Colette here illuminates the depths of sexuality made taboo in these politically correct times and reveals how women can and do desire a master. For Colette - and for Claudine - love is inevitably a delicious game of capitulation.

What shines through Claudine in Paris, as in all of Colette's work, is the hunger, the richness and pure physicality of the prose, the revelling of a cupiscent writer in words until the very air which Claudine breathes, sadly scented with asphalt in the city's hot summer, is brought vividly to dwell in our own flesh. Poignant and cruel, Claudine in Paris which teeters always between the crass and sublime, is a book that will not leave you alone.

(c) Philippa Tatham 2008

Reviewed 23 May 08 / London

NOTES - Claudine In Paris, first published in French as Claudine à Paris in 1901, written by Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) (1873-1954), is in print and available from bookshops.