'Bridget Jones' blogger sacked for revealing too much

Maybe it was a giveaway remark during post-work aperitifs or a clue too many left "sur internet".

But for a British secretary in Paris, efforts to keep her blog and her work life separate have ended in legal acrimony - and a race for her signature on a book deal.

When the La Petite Anglaise website began two years ago, it was described by its thirtysomething author as a "whim" offering a wry look at life as a highly-qualified PA and mother of a bilingual toddler in France.

By yesterday, the secretary who wishes to be known only by her first name - Catherine - was fighting to set a legal precedent in France and coping with a media onslaught after she was dismissed by her employers, a firm of Anglo-French accountants, for "gross misconduct" by allegedly bringing them into disrepute with her postings.

The single mother and award-winning "blogueuse", whose on-line diary gets up to 3,000 hits a day, has never revealed her own identity; that of "Mr Frog", her former French partner and the father of "Tadpole", her three-year-old daughter; or that of her former employers.

But senior managers at Dixon Wilson, which has offices in London and Paris offering a "personal service to wealthy individuals and their businesses", took a dim view when word of Catherine's pensees on love and work became known in the firm's plush offices in the centre of the French capital.

On 26 April this year, she was summonsed before a senior partner and told she was being suspended pending dismissal for "faute grave" or gross misconduct.

The grounds for her sacking, which was only made public this week after her period of notice expired, was eventually downgraded to a lesser offence but she is fighting a claim for compensation, one of the first in France over alleged transgressions relating to a blog.

To this day, she does not know how knowledge of her blog, which she kept strictly secret from colleagues, reached her employers.

Yesterday, she told The Independent: "I'm not sure how it came out. I didn't talk to anyone at work about it. But then one day I noticed from the feedback on the blog that someone had looked at all 200 hundred pages in a single day. I thought it was a bit odd but thought nothing more of it.

"But shortly afterwards I was called in and told I was being suspended. I was told that what I had written had brought the company into disrepute and given five minutes to clear my desk and leave."

Catherine, 33, a French and German graduate from York who has lived in Paris for 11 years, confirmed that she sometimes worked on her blog during office hours but only when she had been told there was no other work to do.

She said she had also taken half a day as leave on two occasions to meet her English boyfriend and claimed it was due to childcare problems.

Her contract permits her to three days a year for emergency child care.

But although La Petite Anglaise was in part inspired by Belle De Jour, the sexually-explicit blog of a London call girl, the Paris secretary's blog is significantly less racy and, as its author puts it, more in the style of a "Bridget Jones in Paris".

Alongside heartfelt musings on her romantic liaisons, including a boyfriend met via the comments box of the blog, and an account of a reunion with her biological parents, are descriptions of her workplace as "an oasis of Britishness in Paris".

She wrote: "Like in the British Embassy, all French rules are suspended upon entering the building and you have to set your watch to GMT.

"There is a framed portrait of Her Majesty QE2 in the entrance hall. We got a day off for the Golden Jubilee. We have Tetley tea and fresh milk in the kitchen (as opposed to nasty French UHT which makes a terrible cuppa)."

Other anecdotes involve the accidental transmission of a shot of her cleavage while setting up a videolink to London and an account of a Christmas party where her boss had committed the "unforgivable faux pas" of pulling crackers before the senior partner and his wife.

Of the senior partner, she wrote: "He wears braces and sock suspenders, stays in gentlemen's clubs in London, and calls secretaries 'typists'. When I speak to him, I can't prevent myself mirroring his plummy Oxbridge accent."

Dixon Wilson yesterday declined to comment on its dismissal of Catherine or her forthcoming case before a French employment tribunal, where she could be awarded up to eight months pay or £18,000 if she wins.

Such a sum could be a drop in an ocean of royalty cheques if interest in La Petite Anglaise from publishers yesterday turns into a firm book deal.

At least two publishers approached the secretary yesterday expressing interest in a book version of the blog.

From Belle De Jour, widely thought to have been the work of a professional author, to the account of a New Yorker's campaign to cook all 524 recipes in a French cook book in a single year, blogs have proved a useful promotional tool for would-be authors.

Catherine, who lives in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, insisted she did not already have a publishing contract.

She said: "I'm just sitting tight at the moment. It has been a traumatic few months - sleepless nights, panic attacks. I'd love to write a book based on the blog but it would be very much the silver lining to a cloud."

- INDEPENDENT