I’ve been rethinking the title for my novel. It’s always been “Nights in Paris”, ever since I first started writing it a few years ago. I never considered another title, but now I’m drawn to “Claudine in Love”. I’m disconcerted: was “Nights in Paris” never the right title, and if so how come it’s taken me all this time to notice? I feel a little remiss. Still, better later than never.
The impetus for the change in title is that a while ago I decided to separate the “Colette” and “Anaïs” parts of my novel into Part One and Part Two, with one part for each character. But that’s not enough: Colette and Anaïs are both sublime characters and deserve their own complete novels, even though there are obvious parallels in their circumstances (women, writers and sometimes Sapphically inclined).
I wrote a short story about Anaïs first, “The Slave of Bracelets”, but since then I’ve found myself writing only about Colette, so Colette alone will be the subject of the first novel. I like “Claudine in Love” as a title because the Claudine character in Colette’s early novels was based on herself, so in a sense Colette is Claudine.
Also, “Claudine Married” was originally published as “Claudine in Love”, until Colette’s female lover recognised herself in the character of Claudine’s lover Rézi and forced the publisher to withdraw the book. Willy changed the title to “Claudine Married” and sold the book to another publisher (“Colette: A Life” by Herbert Lottman, p.53). I’m so glad they managed to republish it, as it’s my favourite novel in the Claudine series. The character of Rézi is beautiful, charming, seductive and utterly untrustworthy: fabulous qualities you’d want in a character, but perhaps not in your lover.