Gigi – Colette
This was the latest novel in my year of classic french literature.
Here’s the blurb …
Gigi is being educated in the skills of the Courtesan: to choose cigars, to eat lobster, to enter a world where a woman’s chief weapon is her body. However, when it comes to the question of Gaston Lachaille, very rich and very bored, Gigi does not want to obey the rules.
I have read the Claudine novels and find Colette’s life fascinating (I read this biography), but I wasn’t overly taken with this novel. A 15 year old is being trained by her family to be a courtesan, she acts simple, but is actually quite clever and gets the man to marry her in the end. I find it terribly creepy that an older man finds her young school girls ways attractive. And that her aunt, grand mother (and to some extent her mother) are grooming her to be a prostitute (hopefully well-paid and well-looked after but a prostitute none-the-less.)
Here is the wikipedia entry on Gigi