Colette wrote this in 1909, and it still quivers with subversion. Minne, all silver-blonde hair and black eyes, has been wrapped in cotton wool by her doting mother, sheltered from every shadow in Parisian streets. But beneath the prim schoolgirl lies a mindafire with fantasies of a mysterious lover called Casque-de-Cuivre, dreaming of the Adventure she can only imagine. When marriage arrives, it brings not romance but humiliation. Yet this disillusionment becomes her liberation: now 'instructed' and awake to what she really wants, Minne pursues her own happiness with determined cunning. Colette's prose is sensual and unsparing, capturing that volatile moment when a woman's inner life shatters the fiction of 'innocence.' The genius lies in showing how the ingénue and the libertine are the same person, just at different points of awakening.
