To return to Claudine, she has some masculine secondary characteristics—she is proud of her boyish height and acrobatic abilities—and a personality in which unfeminine traits were emphasized by her freedom and independence while young. But she never rebels against the feminine role. She is also proud of her beautiful hair and eyes, and she never abandons skirts even on her strenuous cross-country rambles. She enjoys her power to attract men, though she scorns flirtation and breaks an umbrella on a boulevardier who risks the traditional continental pinch. Her reaction to the women who attract her is definitely male—primarily physical, roused by beauty and passivity, and manifesting itself in a desire to conquer and dominate. It contrasts sharply with the clinging adoration of Luce, Aimée, and Annie. It is most often stirred, after the initial “crush” on Aimée, by girls younger than herself, those who recall her own youth or the masochistic devotion of young Luce. This is particularly stressed in the early pages of _Claudine en Ménage_, when, taking Renaud on a visit to her old school, she finds there a handful of delicious adolescents spending their holidays in the dormitory, and plays recklessly with them. It appears again in _Claudine s’en Va_, when she encounters at the spa an impudent comedienne so much like herself a few years earlier as to provoke universal comment on the resemblance. This young woman, Polaire, was a real not a fictional character who had acted in a dramatic version of _Claudine à Paris_ in 1903, and who appears in the story under her own name, as do various other contemporary personalities in the course of the five volumes. (A particularly malicious sketch of Mme. Dieulafoy, whose opera _Sémiramis_ had just been presented, figures in _Claudine s’en Va_ in a letter from the music critic Maugis.)[6]