Tonight, as usual, Catherine will sit at the computer in her Parisian garret and offer up a soupçon from her life. What will she disclose this time: more tales of her poor parenting skills, an affair with a man she met online, further professional cock-ups? “My test is: ‘Would I tell my mother this?’ If the answer is yes then online it goes. The only problem,” the 33-year-old sighs, “is that I happen to have a very open relationship with my mum, which is probably where the trouble began.”

Last week it was revealed that Catherine — known to fans as La Petite Anglaise, her internet alias — was sacked for betraying the confidence of Dixon Wilson, the British accountancy firm where she worked as a secretary.

Her employers, it seemed, were less keen on Petite’s online antics than her 3,000 daily readers. They took umbrage with entries such as Titillation (from May 2005) describing her struggle to set up a video link between the firm’s Paris and London boardrooms, in which her cleavage became the accidental star:

“Clearly I hadn’t got the webcam angle quite right, and there I am, in my full glory, my V-necked jumper revealing a little more than I would have liked. I have managed not only to show my breasts, but also to swear in front of Old School Boss. A sea of smirking faces swim into view. It would appear that their meeting room was already occupied too, with a full complement of London board members.”

Like a lot of bloggers, Catherine says that notions of celebrity and publishing deals tempted her to reveal herself online — like Belle de Jour, the call girl turned blogeuse whose book has sold 90,000 copies.

As such, she is part of a growing number of bloggers (56% of whom are women, statistics say) plundering their sex lives, messy divorces, embarrassing ailments and work squabbles for a shot at techno-fame. The internet is no longer a mere crutch for the lonely and atomised. It is where we go to air our dirty laundry. The dirtier that laundry is, the more attention you get.

Just ask Jessica Cutler, the Senate aide who wrote about sexual mischief on Capitol Hill in 2004. Or Suzanne Portnoy, a middle-aged Brit who is blogging about her affairs with “top London chefs” and “men’s magazine editors”. Dooce, the most famous American blogger, wrote of her search to find a husband and spared no detail of the resulting childbirth.

She, too, was sacked for blogging from (and about) work. At the time she told readers “Be ye not so stupid”, an oft quoted internet precept. But as Petite Anglaise has discovered, losing a job is but one pitfall. For her, it was only the most recent fallout from a dangerous virtual life.

In summer 2004 Catherine (who prefers to remain anonymous) was in a rut. Mr Frog (her live-in boyfriend and father of the one-year-old Tadpole) was spending increasing hours at the office, coming home drunk, sometimes throwing up in her bed for good measure. Tired of beavering between desk and cradle and with nobody to talk to, the Yorkshire-born PA turned to her laptop for support.

She resolved initially only to blog about the foibles of French life: Métro etiquette, haughty shop assistants and her high maintenance Algerian baby-sitter who is obsessed with Dior handbags. She won readers for being witty and accessible, a typical observation being: why — given the number of cake-faced older women — is there no equivalent French phrase for mutton dressed as lamb? Then one day (a day which seems to come to all anonymous bloggers) the need to spill overtook her. On a whim she moaned that Mr Frog was refusing to get married and posted his e-mail address so that people might badger him. Her readership doubled. Later she wrote about being adopted and the tough time she was having with her biological mother. Result? Flooded inbox and a hooked Catherine.

“My life at that time was very boring,” she explains. “Having your first child really turns you upside down and blogging became a release. I was lonely and it was somewhere I could collect my thoughts. Thanks to the blog, I became a new person.”

Was it addictive? “Oh yes, because it’s immediate gratification. You have an audience who write back and push you to reveal more and more.”

And more is what she gave them. In May last year Petite reported that she had dumped Mr Frog in this startling post: “I expected fireworks and melodrama. I felt I deserved them, somehow. Here was I, stammering in a low, guilt-ridden voice that I had finally found the strength to walk away from this relationship which was not what I wanted any more.”

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