This series presents the emotional history of the delightful Claudine between the ages of fifteen and thirty, and incidentally incorporates the authors’ opinions upon many sorts of sexual relation. Claudine appears first as a day pupil in a provincial public school somewhere in the mountainous _départements_ of southern France. Motherless, she is brought up after a fashion by a father so absorbed in his studies as to approach a caricature of the absent-minded professor, and by a free-tongued servant comparable to Proust’s Françoise. She grows up a tomboy, free to climb trees, to roam alone over the wooded hills about her small town, and to read at will in her father’s uncensored library. Her emotional development begins with an attraction appropriate to her years (fifteen) but uncommonly intense, to a pretty assistant mistress, Mademoiselle Aimée. With Claudine’s wily arrangement to be tutored in English at home, this affair promises to develop richly, but it is interrupted when the headmistress, a domineering redhead, also contracts a passion for her assistant. Knowing on which side her bread is buttered, Aimée abandons Claudine, to become the pampered darling of her superior. Two or three of the “big girls” understand perfectly what is going on, and Claudine even eavesdrops one day upon an intimate moment enjoyed by the two women in their dormitory quarters while their classes run wild in the schoolrooms below. Later, the headmistress implies to Claudine that had she not from the outset shown antagonism, her affection might have been bestowed on her rather than on the somewhat insipid junior mistress. In the course of the year, Claudine discovers that she is becoming attractive to men, notably the school’s visiting physician, a “wolf” at whom she laughs although he has an irritating power to move her. He uses his political influence to the end of enjoying Aimée’s favors, an affair to which the older mistress appears indifferent, her jealousy being reserved for feminine rivals. A second diversion develops when Aimée’s young sister, Luce, enters at mid-term as a charity pupil and is badly neglected by the two mistresses. A year Claudine’s junior, this thin green-eyed youngster becomes her adoring slave, constantly manoeuvering for caresses, but receiving only blows, which she appears to find almost as satisfying. To herself, Claudine admits that, were the girl anyone but a sister to the fickle Aimée, the affair might go farther. At the graduation dance—a neat bit of satire on provincial entertainment—Claudine is much sought after by local and visiting swains, and analyzes afterward why she found their attentions so unsatisfactory. She contemplates what she wants of love: I terribly needed Someone, and was humiliated by this lack, and because I could not give anything to anyone I did not love and know through and through—a dream which will never come true, eh?[1]