Claudine at School by Colette

Author:Colette
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446475058
Publisher: Random House

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Lord, how idiotic women are! (Little girls, women, it’s all one.) Would anyone believe that, ever since that inveterate wolf Dutertre’s ‘guilty attempts’ on my person, I’ve felt what might be called a vague pride? It’s very humiliating to me, that admission. But I know why; in my heart of hearts, I tell myself: ‘If that man, who’s known heaps of women, in Paris and all over the place, finds me attractive, it must be because I’m not remarkably ugly!’ There! It was a pleasure to my vanity. I didn’t really think I was repulsive, but I like to be sure I’m not. And besides, I was pleased at having a secret that the lanky Anaïs, Marie Belhomme, Luce Lanthenay and the others didn’t suspect.

The class was well trained now. All the girls, even down to those in the Third Division knew that, during recreation, they must never enter a classroom in which the mistresses had shut themselves up. Naturally, our education hadn’t been perfected in a day! One or other of us had gone at least fifty times into the classroom where the tender couple was hiding. But we found them so tenderly entwined, or so absorbed in their whisperings, or else Mademoiselle Sergent holding her little Aimée on her lap with such total lack of reserve that even the stupidest were nonplussed and fled as soon as the Redhead demanded: ‘What do you want now?’, terrified by the ferocious scowl of her bushy eyebrows. Like the others, I frequently burst in and sometimes even without meaning to: the first few times, when they saw it was me and they were too close together, they hastily got up or else one of them would pretend to pin up the other’s loosened hair. But they ended up by not disturbing themselves on my account. So I no longer found it entertaining.

Rabastens doesn’t come over any more: he has declared over and over again that he is ‘too intimidated by this intimacy’ and this expression seemed to him a kind of pun which delighted him. As for them, they no longer think of anything but themselves. They dog each other’s footsteps and live in each other’s shadow: their mutual adoration is so absolute that I no longer think of tormenting them. I almost envy their delicious oblivion of everything else in the world.

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