Bad Old Golden-Rule Days

CLAUDINE AT SCHOOL (286 pp.)--Coletfe -- Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.50).

Any group of wide-awake P.T.A. mothers, from Larchmont to Santa Monica, would be appalled by the situation at Montigny. The district superintendent of schools not only sleeps with the women teachers but pinches the girl students while inviting them up to see his etchings; the headmistress is a Lesbian; her kittenish assistant indiscriminately chases both sexes; one of the male teachers writes love sonnets to a pretty 15-year-old.

No wonder Claudine. the pretty 15-year-old, laments: ''Tomorrow [is] Sunday. No school. What a bore! It's the only place I find amusing.'' The single drawback is that "all those people were beginning to wear me out by forcing me to be incessantly trying to find out what they were thinking of doing.'' By cunning eavesdropping, peeping, threats, gathering of girlish confidences and the reading of other people's love letters, Claudine manages to stay on top of the news.

Only in a Colette novel could such details be touched with innocence and wonder. Like most restless and intelligent adolescents, Claudine seeks knowledge for its own sake. For her, adult behavior is neither good nor evil. It is just continuously absorbing, as the sex life of a lemming might be to a biologist. Similarly, Claudine punches and teases little Luce Lanthenay merely from a clinical desire to discover the effect of such cruelty on herself. All her hyperthyroid activity has but one goal: to make things happen and then study the results.

This book, an able new translation by British Author Antonia White of the late Colette's long-famed first novel, is part of the publisher's project to bring out the author's complete works at ten-month intervals. Written by Colette when she was 22 and published in 1900, Claudine at School was an instant and scandalous success. It went through innumerable editions and became so much a byword that manufacturers flooded Paris with a Lotion Claudine, a Chapeau Claudine, a Glace-Claudine and a Parfum de Claudine. Though lacking some of the rueful insight of Colette's later novels, the book remains a fresh and impressive piece of work, providing wit. penetrating observation, and a tolerable road map to the devious paths of a young girl's thinking. Most readers, as well as all P.T.A. mothers, will be able to echo Claudine's heartfelt observation: "Honestly, this is no ordinary school!"

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