In the Montreal district of Saint-Henri, a population of French-Canadian workers and low-level employees is desperately in search of happiness. Florentine believes she has found hers in love; Rose-Anna looks for him in the well-being of her family; Azarius flees in the dream; Emmanuel enlists; Jean undertakes his social ascent. Each, in his own way, invents his own way of salvation and each, in his own way, fails. But their fate is at the same time that of millions of others, not only in Montreal but everywhere else, in a world in the throes of war.

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My cow Bossie, Courte-Queue, The Emperor of the woods, The Spanish and the Pekinese, these 4 animal stories are brought together here for the first time. At the same time as the publication of the Centenary Edition of the works of Gabrielle Roy begins, Le Boréal is republishing its magnificent Tales for children, originally published in the form of a collection in 1998.

This mature book brings out with more brilliance than ever the qualities of emotion, observation and writing that so strongly distinguish the work of Gabrielle Roy. Drawing inspiration from her own experience as a teacher, the novelist draws here the portrait of young beings who for her bear both the face of childhood and that of all of humanity. Through Nil and Demetrioff manifests the power of art and beauty; in André are embodied the humble virtues of courage and self-sacrifice; by Médéric, finally, the quiverings of sensuality and the mysterious power of love are revealed. First published in 1977 and translated into English soon after, Ces enfants de ma vie won Gabrielle Roy her third Governor General's Award.

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Written shortly after the death of Bernadette, the beloved "dear little sister", during one of the summers that Gabrielle Roy spent at her little house in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François, in Charlevoix, this work is a mourning book. But a mourning both experienced and consoled by “the dazzling revelation of all things”, by the voices of the wind, the sea and the sky, by the song of all living things, trees, flowers, birds, humans. Images of paradise, but of a paradise haunted by death, the nineteen stories that make up this book speak the language of the heart, of which they speak of the enchantment and the distress, but above all the infinite trust placed in innocence and to the beauty of the world. 

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Learning of her darling brother's illness, an old lady takes a long bus trip from Winnipeg to the California coast. Along the way, she discovers the continent and the beings that surround her, and above all she rediscovers by telling them her own youth and this "boredom" that she has always felt for her knows not what elsewhere, what higher and more true. Éveline will arrive too late to speak to her brother. But this one, by attracting her into this adventure, will have allowed her to find herself the answers to the questions she wanted to ask him so much. Ely! Ely! Ely! is also the story of a journey, that of a young woman reconnecting with her family, where she thought she was completely lost. 

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By devoting the last years of her life to writing this autobiography, the publication of which, she had decided, would not take place until after her death, Gabrielle Roy sought both to take stock of her own existence and to confer on it, forever, the admirable and enigmatic character of a literary work. To transform, in short, his life into a novel. First published in 1984, La Détresse et l'Echantement recounts his formative years, from his childhood in Manitoba until his return from Europe on the eve of the Second World War, that is to say the story of his gradual coming to writing.

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If she is above all a novelist, Gabrielle Roy has published throughout her career a large number of articles and various essays. It is a selection of these writings that we will find here, divided under three main headings. "Reports" that illustrate his very personal way of perceiving and rendering the reality that surrounds him. In second place come the "Souvenirs", as well as the ironic evocation of the circumstances in which the novelist received the prestigious Fémina prize in 1947. Finally, we will read here the long meditation that Gabrielle Roy wrote in 1967 around the theme "Terre des men", in which his vision of the world is most clearly expressed and some of the themes that secretly nourish the writing of his novels. 

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Throughout her life as a writer, Gabrielle Roy maintained a very abundant correspondence, with her friends, with her readers, and especially with the members of her family. This volume brings together 138 unpublished letters she wrote to her older sister.

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My little street that took me around the world, the first "Manitoban" edition of a work by Gabrielle Roy, includes an autobiographical account of the first lady of French-Canadian literature and a dozen color watercolors of landscapes Manitobans by Gabrielle Roy signed Réal Bérard. A special edition published in a single edition of 1000 copies for the benefit of the Corporation Maison Gabrielle-Roy.

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Throughout her career, Gabrielle Roy maintained an abundant correspondence with members of her family, friends, business relations and readers. The letters to her husband, Doctor Marcel Carbotte, constitute the most important part of it. This volume brings together the four hundred and eighty-five letters that the novelist sent to him between 1947, the year of their meeting and their marriage, and 1979, the year in which she suffered her first heart attack.

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Gabrielle Roy recounts here the adventure of a painter-trapper by the name of Pierre Cadorai: his years of wandering in the mythical landscapes of the Canadian Far North, his rare encounters, the slow learning of his craft as an artist applied to grasping the man's barest face in the midst of the sometimes friendly and sometimes inhospitable nature that surrounds him. The novelist, who wrote this book at the midpoint of her career, transforms Pierre's existence, his miseries and his joys, his thirst for beauty and plenitude, the vision both demanding and exalted that he has of his work. of a creator, in a kind of fable illustrating not only the condition of any artist, but more particularly of the artist that she wanted to be herself, as if to remind herself of the artistic quest to which she dedicated herself his life.

Gabrielle Roy, from the memory of a summer spent in a wild region of Manitoba, north of Winnipeg, a country located further than the "end of the end of the world", imagined the beginning of all things again: from education, of society, of civilization itself. She has populated this country of great nature and singing water with gentle and simple characters, enamored of both solitude and fraternity with regard to their fellow men. La Petite Poule d'Eau was first published in 1951.

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In the Inuit community of Ungava, where the first white people recently settled, a cultural drama is playing out: that of the confrontation between the traditional values of a thousand-year-old civilization and those brought with them by the emissaries of science and progress from the South. This drama sometimes gives rise to comical juxtapositions, sometimes to heartbreaks that call into question the whole of life, the whole identity of the being in whom the two worlds meet. This is the case of Elsa, the heroine of La Rivière sans repos, mother of a child who, by her very existence, embodies both the clash of two civilizations and their dialogue, that is to say the balance so difficult to achieve between their respective requirements.

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Four stories make up the framework of this novel in which Gabrielle Roy pursues - by deepening it - the exploration of her own condition as a woman and as a writer that she had undertaken in Rue Deschambault. Christine, this time, discovers the great mysteries of existence and creation: the passage and eternity of time, the sequence of generations and ages of life, the risks of wandering, the hard need to break if you want to fulfill your destiny. Exhilarating or harrowing, these discoveries are made through the most familiar experiences, such as a road trip across the Manitoba plain. The first edition of La Route d'Altamont was published in Montreal in 1966 and in Paris in 1967. 

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The time that missed me fait  following The Distress and The Enchantment. It covers the years during which Gabrielle, living in Montreal, worked in the more or less obscure profession of freelance journalist and began to write her first novel, which would become Bonheur d'occasion. Centered on the death of Mélina, the mother, the story unfolds entirely under the sign of mourning, through which the young woman tries to grasp her own identity and the meaning of her destiny. We will therefore find in these pages, the last ones she wrote, all the power of evocation and this incomparable art of emotional narration which make the singularity and the genius of Gabrielle Roy. 

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Through the eighteen stories that make up this book, Gabrielle Roy has transformed the memories of her Manitoba youth into a novel recounting the apprenticeship of a writer. Christine gradually discovers the reality - familiar and yet inexhaustible - of the little street of Saint-Boniface where she was born and where humanity shows its most varied faces. But above all, her own dreams are revealed to her, that is to say both what brings her closer to others and separates her from them, what makes her love them deeply and at the same time obliges her to leave them for still. Gabrielle Roy's fourth book, Rue Deschambault was first published in 1955. It was translated into English and Italian and won the novelist her second Governor General's Award for Canada.

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A garden at the end of the world was born from the vision that I caught one day, in passing, of a garden full of flowers at the edge of the cleared land, and of the woman working there, under the wind, with a head scarf, who looked up at me to follow me with a long perplexed and pleading look that I kept seeing again and which never stopped, for years, until I complied, asking myself what all of us may be asking in the depths of our silence: Tell me about my life. GR A Garden at the End of the World was first published in 1975. 

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Volume 26 - number 2 - 2014 - Special issue

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“Around Gabrielle Roy ”

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Saint-Boniface University Press

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Volume 29 - number 2 - 2017 - Special issue

Territory, language and identity: Northern presences in Western Canada

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Saint-Boniface University Press

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"At the heart of the Francophonie in Western Canada "

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Saint-Boniface University Press

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In the Montreal district of Saint-Henri, a

Gabrielle Roy is one of the greatest figures in French-Canadian literature. His work is immense. From 1945 until her death, which occurred in 1983, she wrote works which immediately established themselves as masterpieces: -bb3b-136bad5cf58d_Alexandre Chenevert, The Secret Mountain and many others. Although widely read, there have been few essays on his books. The wealth of their content, far from being exhausted, leaves the researcher free to browse Les Chemins secrets de Gabrielle Roy.

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Colloque international « Gabrielle Roy » : actes du colloque soulignant le cinquantième anniversaire de Second-hand happiness (September 27 to 30, 1995) by André Fauchon (Saint-Boniface, Saint-Boniface University Press)

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The author deals with the primordial role played by Manitoba in the imagination of the illustrious novelist, Gabielle Roy.

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Eighteen collaborators talk about how Gabrielle Roy's work and personality have touched them personally. There could be no greater praise for  this great novelist than to ask  scholars around the world to talk about the importance the writer has for them and for Canadian and world literature.

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Find texts by François Paré, André Brochu, Alexandre Amprimoz, Lori Saint-Martin and many others.

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After going through Gabrielle Roy's extensive correspondence archives, François Ricard gives here a model for a writer's biography and above all a portrait of a woman who reaches what is most deeply human in us. "Every writer should be lucky enough to find a François Ricard to tell his life, and to tell it with such a sense of dignity and the ultimate mystery of his subject." John Lennox, The Literary Review of Canada

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This bibliography aims to help students, teachers and researchers to identify, in the mass of critical writings - 22 books and nearly 335 articles - devoted to Gabrielle Roy for 20 years, those who will best enlighten their research.

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ReviewFrench Quebecpresents its 170th issue with the following subjects: Memoirs of Gabrielle Roy, Initial training and didactic training as well as several other chronicles. 

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Gabrielle Roy was born in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba on March 23, 1909. It was in Manitoba that she studied, taught, and published her first texts. She lived in the province until 1937 before embarking on the odyssey that would make her a famous and celebrated author. In the centenary year of her birth, Franco-Manitoban authors and artists pay homage to the one who was a beacon, who traced a path from the small rue Deschambault in Saint-Boniface, who gave them to understand that he is possible to be here, author or artist.

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Life and work of Marie-Anna Roy, sister of Gabrielle Roy. The analysis of this work reveals an often torn but tenacious woman carried away, sometimes to excess, by her exacerbated desires.

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A very wise title for a novel that is less so. Claudine recognizes it: "True, this school is not trivial!" How could she be? The students have unusual personalities: the great Anaïs, whom Claudine describes as a liar, trickster, sycophant, traitor, also has “a real science of comedy”; the Jauberts are irritating by dint of wisdom; Marie Belhomme, “baby, but so cheerful”; Luce, charming as well as sly; and the others, “the vile people”.

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Her father having decided to move to Paris, here is Claudine transplanted far from her “dear woods”. The shock is harsh; she falls ill, but vitality takes over. At her aunt Cœur's house, she meets Marcel, handsome and charming. He introduces him to his friends, who are just as refined as him. She becomes their confidante… Marcel has a father, Renaud, who is still young. Claudine is not long in falling in love with it. Renaud, a pleasant dilettante, introduces her to the secret charms of the city - the theatres, the restaurants, the suppers - and its fauna... But Claudine, despite her curiosity and her exuberance, is fierce. To follow Renaud would be to renounce the loneliness that vivifies her, her village that she misses, a past from which she cannot manage to detach herself. He will have to choose...

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The bizarre comedy that was my wedding day! Three weeks of engagement, the frequent presence of this Renaud whom I love to panic, his still embarrassing eyes, his lips always in search of a piece of me made me for that Thursday a sharp mine of burning pussy.

I understood nothing of his reserve, his abstention, at that time! I would have been all his, as soon as he wanted it: he felt that.

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Annie adores Alain, her husband. She is completely under his domination and only knows how to obey. But Alain goes on a trip and Annie finds herself alone, completely terrified, determined to apply to the letter the "Schedule" that her husband gave her and which includes, among other things: A single visit to Renaud and Claudine, cleaning really too fanciful for a young woman whose husband is traveling far away. Seeing and going out often with my sister Marthe because despite her somewhat free exterior, she has great common sense and even practical sense. With Marthe, Annie will go to a spa and then to the Bayreuth Festival, meet all kinds of people, learn and understand many things and see Claudine often...
 

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Granddaughter and adored niece of two demi-mondaines, Gigi applies herself to delicately eating American-style lobster, to distinguishing a topaz from a daffodil diamond and above all not to associate with “ordinary people”. He is taught his future job as a large casserole. But Gigi and Gaston Lachaille, the wealthy heir to sugars of the same name, decide otherwise... Gigi, one of Colette's rare happy love novels, gives its title to this collection which brings together three other nouvelles : « L'enfant malade », « La dame du photographe » et «_cc781905 -5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_Flore and Pomona ”.

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Immobilized, Colette observes the sky, the path of the moon or Vesper in the quadrilateral that the Palais-Royal cuts out, the faces, “the prodigies magnified by [the] magnifying glass”. Associations of ideas and digressions abound, dealing with the near past (the war, the imprisonment of Maurice Goudeket), or distant (the life of the major daily newspapers at the beginning of the century, the found portrait of Sido's mother). Along the way are celebrated dear figures – Hélène Picard, Renée Hamon. The last lines leave as much room for the needle as for the pen: “My slow steeds, try to go together: I can see the end of the road from here. »

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Slender, with superb black eyes, hair so blond that it looks silver, Minne is a lovely person adored by her mother. She follows the courses of the Desire ladies to meet well-bred young girls there, and on occasion, to learn there… Everything has been arranged so that Minne has a very comfortable life. But Minne dreams of something else, she wants to experience what she calls Adventure. Married, disappointed, humiliated, but now informed and having understood that Adventure is Love, Minne will then look with determination for the man who will give her this wonderful happiness of which all the women she knows speak and all books too.

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When their life together begins, Alain and Camille are two childhood friends that everything seems to bring together. But their secret daydreams divide them. What Alain likes in Camille is an idealized beauty, made up of immobility and silence. So he is disconcerted by her exuberance. Like the arrival of a new season, the discovery of their intimate division puts him at the mercy of other dreams.  And that's when the drama begins. The cat Saha will henceforth be for Alain the sublime chimera which dominates his life and for Camille the hated rival against whom no process is too brutal. With unequaled mastery and sobriety, Colette has composed, following the rules of classical art, a real love tragedy with three characters.

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Cheri's despair as he returns from the Great War and no longer recognizes the world he left. It's time for trading and greed. His once mute and frightened wife now manages the couple's affairs. His former mistress has become an obese old woman who has drawn a line under her past life. Returning to his idle pre-war existence, Chéri no longer knows what role to play and discovers his inability to adapt. Idle and apathetic, locked in a radical solitude and foreign to the values to which society clings, the young man will choose death. Representative of this generation ravaged by a new evil of the century, Chéri takes his place among the great romantic figures of the immediate post-war period.

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  In thirty-five chapters, each one constituting a short story, Colette revives with rare happiness in this book of memories her happy childhood, her family and especially her mother, the marvelous Sido so much loved.

The animals, too, of which Colette speaks better than anyone, are an integral part of this house which, thanks to the genius of the author, becomes unforgettable. La Maison de Claudine, a sensitive and moving work, is one of the finest by this great writer.

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By the grace of the writer, the dogs and cats who live in these pages are marvelously themselves, captured with an extraordinary happiness of expression, at the same time as they appear as beings endowed with reason and speech.
They deliver a sometimes cruel truth, certainly, but innocent - subtle ambiguity which is one of the deepest and most continuous topics of all the work of Colette.

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Very young… no, I'm not very young anymore. I kept my size, my freedom of movement; I still have my garment of narrow flesh which dresses me without a crease... I have changed all the same. I know myself so well! My chestnut-colored hair still thickens, plentiful, pressed into round curls, the slightly too sharp angle of a chin that everyone agrees finds spiritual. The mouth has lost its gaiety and, below the more voluptuous but also more hollow orbit, the cheek tapers, long, less velvety, less full: the curling light already indicates the furrow there - again a dimple, or already laughing? - that patiently models the smile...

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Advertising brochures, slogans for posters or inserts in the press make it possible to discover an unknown Colette, a pioneer here again, and faithful, in everything she does, to this unique style which made her famous, where the gift of observation, humour, the art of recreating the sensation and of making perceptible "with the help of poor words" the freshness of sparkling water, the perfume of a coffee, the touch of a leather or fabric.

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Renée Néré, tired of the infidelities of her husband, the painter Taillandy, has just left him. The separation leaves her bruised. To support her life, Renée becomes a mime, dancer and actress. A wealthy heir, Maxime, falls in love with her. The young woman is tempted by this new love, but the painful memories of her first marriage are omnipresent. At the end of a theatrical tour, she makes her decision... The novel is rich in Colette's first matrimonial experiences. It is also a hymn to the theatre, behind the scenes and to the low-income earners who populate it. These two themes – the renunciation of love and the music hall – which will be those that the writer will develop throughout his work, are here inextricably intertwined. La Vagabonde is the novel of disillusion, of nostalgia, but also of inner combat and self-victory.

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In the past, the nightingale did not sing at night. It is for having failed to perish, prisoner of the vine wrapped around him while he slept, that he now listens to her voice in order to stay awake...
When in 1908 Colette published this collection of short texts – dialogues of animals, evocations of nature, meditations on love, loneliness, the passage of time… – she separated from Willy, her first husband, definitively. determined to impose her independence as an artist and as a woman. "I no longer know the happy sum, but I no longer fear the tendrils of the vine," she said. And it is indeed the free and singular voice of a writer that makes itself heard in these moving pages of poetry, tenderness, boldness too, where the novelist of Chéri and La Vagabonde has brought together in a bouquet the themes of all his work.

  "A letter is a sacred object that no sale should profane: it is an intolerable scandal to scatter to the four winds thoughts, impressions, known only to two people." If I allowed myself to be convinced to order the approximately six hundred and fifty pieces of this puzzle, it was to show an unknown aspect of Colette and bring “Little Colette” to life. What I couldn't imagine was that all the originals would be stolen from my house the same day the job was completed... May the burglar remember the above sentence and return his loot...

Account by Colette of her years of apprenticeship: her inexperience at 20, the flames of Parisian life, her marriage to Willy, whom she almost immediately considers a mistake, her desire to leave him, the negro work this makes her endorse, forcing her to write the series of "Claudine"... With, in the background of her bitter memories, the flashy Paris of the Belle Epoque.

In Folioplus Classiques, the text, enriched with a reading of images, a pictorial echo of the work, is followed by its perspective organized into six points: - Literary life: Mothers-daughters: the ravages of love - The writer at his desk: The letter, that fragile object of desire - Thematic grouping of texts: Sido: a literary myth - Stylistic grouping of texts: The education of girls - Chronology: The chain of ladies - Sheet: Des tracks to account for his reading. Recommended for middle school classes.

A month of May of the war. Mitsou, a little dancer from the Empyrée-Montmartre, is about to enter the stage when her friend Petite-Those appears in her dressing room, accompanied by two young second lieutenants, a khaki and a horizon blue. Mitsou is cold and reserved. But she is very pretty and Lieutenant Blue, before returning to the front, sends her a letter. A correspondence is established. Despite the spelling mistakes, somewhat popular turns of phrase, Mitsou's letters enchant the young man; she reveals herself to be of great purity of heart. Each of the letters brings them closer and they end up forgetting everything that separates them, until the day when Lieutenant Blue arrives on leave...
 

The 1940 war on a daily basis. Lived, seen not by the fighters (which ones?), but by a woman whose arthritis is beginning to immobilize her. Restrictions, a few recipes for forgetting them or pretending, the black market, the "tricks and barters" system, the mutual aid that brings together the inhabitants of the Palais-Royal, entertainment (mainly reading), exhibitions (of dolls old, of butterflies...), the little people of Paris, the animals and the deprivations to which they too are subjected... These paintings sketched from day to day are so many images of vanished moments that History has never not always able to retain, but which Colette, with her rare acuity, knew how to capture and, by her incisive style, eternalize.

The texts that make up Prisons and Paradise (1932) revolve around three essential elements of Colette's life: animals that are free or locked up; the South of France, which Colette discovered late and where she carefully furnished her house "La Treille muscate" and her Provençal garden; finally North Africa, in stories where she exalts the beauty of beings and landscapes. We also find in this collection various chronicles as well as portraits of friends, acquaintances or celebrities 

In Sido, Colette evokes the memory of her beloved mother.

She also tells us about her father, "the captain", Sido's second husband, her older sister, "the foreigner", and her two brothers, "the savages", about the love that united her parents and her happy childhood.

"Indifferent to History", according to Aragon, Colette herself maintained this idea by affirming her horror for general ideas, her lack of interest in politics ("vehement poison"), and her refusal to think ("I write Do I still have to think?”).

While all over the world the voice of women is beginning to be heard to denounce the oppression and violence of which they have been the object for too long, literary history has very opportunely joined the news thanks to the film_cc781905- 5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_Colette, released on French screens at the beginning of the year.

"I want to do what I want..." Alternately novelist, mime, playwright, journalist, actress, theater critic, beauty products seller, screenwriter, Colette led her life at a beating pace, as she heard.

Trained at Willy's school, Colette understood the importance of advertising very early on. In 1932, she chose to make her name a brand and go into the business of beauty products, with the slogan: "Are you for, or against the ''second job'' of the writer? ".

Book inspired by the exhibition of the same name presented at the Colette Museum in 2017.

Colette embodied and still embodies a certain France: the celebration of nature and the passion for the theater, the rule and order of the provinces, the frivolity and disorder of Parisian life. Few authors will have worked with so much perseverance in the elaboration of their myth. Throughout her life, Colette never ceased to maintain a true vocation to happiness.
By retracing the course of Colette's life and work, and by re-establishing certain truths along the way, thus scratching the famous legend, Michel del Castillo confirms that between facts and feelings there is always the gap between literature.
After an abundant body of work which he himself qualifies as dark, he offers us a luminous and solar book.

Arrived at the height of her glory, Colette will never miss an opportunity to say that Willy was her evil genius. She will even go so far as to publish a dependent work,My learnings, where she delivers an image of her young years pushed to black. That of an innocent provincial, perverted by an old husband, exploited by an unscrupulous man who locked her up to force her to write novels that he wouldn't allow her to sign. Eighty rare and precious documents, gathered here for the first time, undermine the "official history". Letters, photos, articles, testimonials, declarations..., lead us to a deep rereading of this extraordinary literary, editorial, sentimental and human adventure. 

Who are you Mrs. Colette? The free and scandalous woman who hit the headlines of the Belle Époque by revealing a bare breast on a stage and appearing on the arm of Mathilde de Morny, the lover of animals and cats, the epicurean who refused the madness of thinness, or the good lady of the Palais-Royal, holder of an earthly and ancestral wisdom, to whom the French Republic granted a national funeral?

Novelist, mime, actress, reporter, drama critic, occasional editor, screenwriter, advertiser and even beauty product seller, a single life was not enough to contain your thirst for freedom and discovery.

Documentary (1951)

Here we are in the presence of two remarkable women: the director Yannick Bellon and, in front of the lens, the Illustrious novelist Colette. Filmed by Yannick Bellon, Colette comes alive, laughs, tells stories.

In this modern and captivating portrait where Colette strolls through her memories, seated in front of her window overlooking the Palais Royal, we discover with delight the places where she lived, her cats, her friendship with Jean Cocteau, her love of writing , his mischievous look at people and life.
A moment of poetic happiness. 

Gabrielle Sidonie Colette, a young woman from a country village, marries a charismatic and dominant Parisian, her senior by fourteen years, known only as “ willy ”. Under his auspices, she was introduced to bohemian Paris where her creative appetite was triggered. Always ready to capitalize on talent, Willy convinces his wife to write novels – to be published under his name. The phenomenal success of his “Claudine” series made Willy a well-known writer and “Colette and Willy” the first modern celebrity couple. Over time, the lack of recognition for her work thwarts Colette, and an affair with the gender-defying Marquise de Belbeuf prompts her to break free.

It is in Saint-Sauveur, in contact with nature and familiar animals, in the family garden, in the countryside and the surrounding forests, that a sensitivity, an instinct were formed: in short, this singular way of apprehending the world, based on the senses, which belongs only to Colette.
Going to meet the young Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette is therefore also going to meet a particularly picturesque corner of the Yonne. For the first time, a documentary film is entirely devoted to the eighteen years that Colette spent in Saint-Sauveur. The author of "Chéri" was aware of his debt. Speaking of her native Puisaye, she recognized: “I belong to a country that I left”.

Based on the work of Colette

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In her diary, the young Claudine, 15, recounts her daily life and the relationships she forges within her school. In full preparation for the patent, she prefers to meddle in the affairs of adults rather than studying. As some men begin to seduce her, she falls in love with the new teacher.

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Colette is one of the greatest French writers. One of those who brought the French language to a point of perfection rarely equaled. This special issue makes you discover the house of his childhood in Puisaye in Burgundy, restored and refurbished thanks to the Friends of the House of Colette.

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