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

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. Claudine is a young woman whose father, a widower, is fond of her but totally obsessed by his study of snails. He sends her to the village day school because boarding school makes her feel penned in, a sensation she cannot stand. 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. 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. That’s about as exciting as the story gets.

Claudine 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. Meanwhile Aimee may or may not be engaging in assignations with one or both of the male instructors. Claudine and her frenemies Marie, Anais, and Luce delight in gossip and alternately bully each other and support one another in tormenting their instructors.

The novel is sensual in its depiction of the crushes of the girls but also in its description of the rural landscape. In general Claudine is not interested in the abstract, but she’s very attentive to physical realities of life. Here she is talking about her cat — I went ahead with including a long quote on the theory that we have many cat lovers here, and let’s be honest, after reading this many of you will feel both happy and will feel that you’ve now read as much of the book at you need to read:

She loves me so much that she understands what I say and comes and rubs against my mouth when she hears the sound of my voice. She also loves books like an old scholar, this Fanchette, and worries me every night after dinner to remove two or three volumes of Papa’s big Larousse from their shelf. The space they leave makes a kind of little square room in which Fanchette settles down and washes herself; I shut the door on her and her imprisoned purr vibrates with a noise like an incessant, muffled drum. From time to time I look at her; then she makes a sign with her eyebrows which she raises like a human being. Lovely Fanchette, how intelligent and understanding you are! You amused me from the moment you came into the world; you’d only got one eye open when you were already attempting warlike steps in your basket, though you were still incapable of standing up on your four matchsticks. Ever since, you’ve lived joyously, making me laugh with your belly-dances in honor of cockchafers and butterflies, your clumsy calls to the birds you’re stalking, your way of quarreling with me and giving me sharp taps that re-echo on my hands. Your behavior is quite disgraceful: two or three times a year I catch you on the garden walls, wearing a crazy, ridiculous expression, with a swarm of tom-cats around you…But, even at these demented seasons, as soon as you catch sight of me, your natural face returns for a moment, and you give me a friendly mew which says something like: “You see what I’m up to. Don’t despise me too much, nature has her urgent demands. But I’ll soon come home again and I’ll lick myself for ages to purify myself of this dissolute life!” O, beautiful Fanchette, your bad behavior is so remarkably becoming to you!

One thing I liked about this book was how well it captured the state of adolescence in which girls seem to be at once too old and too young for their ages. The way Claudine and her friends can slip from lascivious speculation about sex to playing jump rope in a Paris courtyard “under the moon until ten o’clock” rang true to me. I also found it interesting that Claudine isn’t nice, and she doesn’t seem interested in being “likeable.” She’s manipulative and frequently cruel. Yet the reader roots for her because she’s also so funny, so smart, so full of energy and so secure in her sense of self. She’s what would happen if Amy from Gone Girl and Amy from Little Women had a French baby who was raised by Amy Sedaris.

Claudine at School is Colette’s first book. I enjoyed it, but I missed having a plot. It’s pages and pages of writing just like the writing quoted above – delightful, but without much reason to keep reading. It’s a fun book to dip into. You don’t have to read it cover to cover to follow what’s going on because so little happens. At the same time, you won’t want to miss the descriptions of young love, beautiful gardens, and conveniently distracted fathers.