Clavdia Chauchat is the sanatorium patient with whom Hans Castorp falls in love in The Magic Mountain: a married woman whose husband is a Russian official living in Dagestan, known for her habit of slamming the glass door of the dining room.
She enters in chapter III with the crash of the door, which provokes in Hans Castorp a "deadly hatred," and, when he finally sees her, with the silence of her footsteps. Her face reminds him of someone he cannot name. In chapter IV the name comes: Clavdia's eyes are those of Pribislav Hippe, the schoolmate to whom he asked to borrow a pencil at thirteen.
On Walpurgis Night, in chapter V, Hans Castorp asks her for a pencil and declares himself in French; she calls him a "petit bourgeois," announces that she is leaving the next day, and walks off asking for the pencil back. In chapter VII she returns to the sanatorium beside the Dutchman Peeperkorn, and the kiss on the forehead that Hans Castorp had refused to give her in front of the living Peeperkorn happens only in front of the dead one.
The novel builds her through objects and repetitions, almost never through her speech: the door, the footsteps, Hippe's eyes, the pencil asked for twice, the portrait painted by Dr. Behrens. She appears more as what Hans Castorp recognizes in her than as someone who explains herself, and that is why his passion is always a second time.