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1 " Les beaux yeux qui ne demandent qu’à sourire ! "
― Colette , Claudine at School
2 " Her nature is like a demonstrative cat's; she is delicate, acutely sensitive to cold, and incredibly caressing in her ways. "
3 " I have lived ten years of wild rovings, of conquests and discoveries, in those woods; the day when I have to leave them my heart will be very heavy. "
4 " Je sais très bien, depuis longtemps, que j’ai un cœur déraisonnable, mais, de le savoir, ça ne m’arrête pas du tout. "
5 " Dans le « programme des examens » les choses ne se passent pas comme dans la vie. "
6 " My name is Claudine, I live in Montigny; I was born there in 1884; I shall probably not die there. My Manual of Departmental Geography expresses itself thus: "Montigny-en-Fresnois, a pretty little town of l, 950 inhabitants, built in tiers above the Thaize; its well-preserved Saracen tower is worthy of note .... "Tome, those descriptions are totally meaningless! To begin with, the Thaize doesn't exist. Of course I know it's supposed to run through the meadows under the level-crossing but you won't find enough water there in any season to give a sparrow a foot-bath. Montigny "built in tiers"? No, that's not how I see it; to my mind, the houses just tumble haphazard from the top of the hill to the bottom of the valley. They rise one above the other, like a staircase, leading up to a big chateau that was rebuilt under Louis XV and is already more dilapidated than the squat, ivy-sheathed Saracen tower that crumbles away from the top a trifle more every day. Montigny is a village, not a town: its streets, thank heaven, are not paved; the showers roll down them in little torrents that dry up in a couple of hours; it is a village, not even a very pretty village, but, all the same, I adore it. The charm, the delight of this countryside composed of hills and of valleys so narrow that some are ravines, lies in the woods-the deep, encroaching woods that ripple and wave away into the distance as far as you can see .... Green meadows make rifts in them here and there, so do little patches of cultivation. But these do not amount to much, for the magnificent woods devour everything. As a result, this lovely region is atrociously poor and its few scattered farms provide just the requisite number of red roofs to set off the velvety green of the woods.Dear woods! I know them all; I've scoured them so often. (...) "
7 " I've known perfectly well, for a long time, that I have an irrational heart. But knowing it doesn't stop me in the least. "
