TO START WITH, MY MOTHER WAS NOT THRILLED BY THE situation. But once she got over her surprise and shock, she consulted her friends and took advice from people around her; no one, apparently, was particularly disturbed. Eventually, in the face of my resolve, she came around. Perhaps she thought I was stronger and more mature than I was. Perhaps she was too alone to act differently. Perhaps she needed a man by her side, someone to father her daughter, to stand up to this anomaly, this aberration, this . . . thing. Someone to take charge.

It would also have helped if the cultural context and the times had been less liberal.

Ten years before I met G., toward the end of the 1970s, a large number of left-wing newspapers and intellectuals regularly came to the defense of adults accused of having had “shameful” relationships with adolescents. In 1977, an open letter in support of the decriminalization of sexual relations between minors and adults, entitled “Regarding a Trial,” was published in the newspaper Le Monde, signed by a number of eminent intellectuals, psychoanalysts, well-known philosophers, and writers at the peak of their careers, largely from the left. They included Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Glucksmann, and Louis Aragon. The letter argued against the detention of three men awaiting trial for having had (and photographed) sexual relations with two minors aged thirteen and fourteen: “Such a lengthy preventative detention to investigate a straightforward affair of ‘morality,’ in which the children were not in any way victims of violence—indeed, on the contrary, they assured the judges that they were consenting (even if the current law denies them the capacity to consent)—seems to us genuinely scandalous.”

The petition was also signed by G.M. But it was not until 2013 that he revealed that he had in fact both initiated and drafted it, and, furthermore, that he had encountered very few negative responses in his quest for signatories (notable among those who refused to sign were Marguerite Duras, Hélène Cixous, and . . . Michel Foucault, who was not exactly the last person to denounce all such forms of repression). The same year, another petition was published in Le Monde, entitled “A Call for the Revision of the Penal Code Regarding Relationships Between Minors and Adults,” which garnered even more support (to name but a few, Françoise Dolto, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida added their support, along with most of those who had signed the earlier petition; the open letter was signed by eighty people, including some of the most high-profile public intellectuals of the era). Yet another petition appeared in 1979 in Libération, in support of one Gérard R., accused of living with girls aged between six and twelve, also signed by several well-known literary figures.

Thirty years on, all the newspapers that had printed these exceedingly dubious opinion pieces went on to publish, one after the other, their mea culpa, arguing that in any period of history, the media merely reflects the ideas of the time.

So why did all these left-wing intellectuals so passionately defend positions that today seem so shocking to us? Particularly the relaxing of the penal code concerning sexual relations between adults and minors, and the abolition of the age of consent?

The reason is that in the 1970s, in the name of free love and the sexual revolution, everyone was supposed to be in favor of the liberation of physical pleasure. Repressing juvenile sexuality was considered to be a form of social oppression, and limiting sexual relationships to those between individuals of the same age range constituted a form of segregation. The fight against any curb on desire, any kind of repression, was the watchword of the era; no one spoke up against it, except for a few straitlaced puritans and reactionary tribunals.

A generation adrift, suffering from a blindness for which nearly all the signatories of these petitions would later apologize.

During the 1980s, the intellectual circle in which I was growing up was still marked by this vision of the world. When she was an adolescent, my mother told me, the body and its desires were still taboo, and her parents never talked to her about sex at all. Having just turned eighteen in May 1968, she first had to free herself from her corseted upbringing, and then from the hold of an unbearable husband whom she married far too young. Like the heroines of Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Sautet’s movies, she now aspired above all to live life according to her own rules. “It’s forbidden to forbid” remained, it seemed, her mantra. It’s not easy to escape the zeitgeist.

This, then, was the context in which my mother eventually came around to the presence of G. in our lives. It was utter madness for her to give us her absolution. I think, deep down, she knew that. Did she also realize that she risked one day being severely criticized, first and foremost by her own daughter? Was I so fiercely obstinate that she was unable to stand up to me? Whatever the reason, her only intervention was to make a pact with G. He had to swear that he would never make me suffer. It was he who told me this. I can just imagine the scene, the two of them looking each other straight in the eye with great solemnity. “Say it: ‘I swear!’”

She sometimes invited him for dinner in our little attic apartment. The three of us would sit around the table, eating lamb and green beans, as though we were playing happy families, daddy-mommy, reunited at the end of the day, with me sitting radiantly between them, the holy trinity, together again.

As shocking and abnormal as it might seem, perhaps G. was for her, subconsciously, the ideal paternal substitute, the father she had been unable to give me.

And on top of it all, this kind of scandalous situation was not entirely displeasing to her. There was even something gratifying about it. In our bohemian world of artists and intellectuals, deviations from conventional morality were viewed with a certain level of tolerance, even admiration. And G. was a well-known writer, which made it altogether rather flattering.

In a different social circle, one in which artists didn’t exercise the same fascination, things would no doubt have turned out differently. The monsieur would have been threatened with being sent to prison. The girl would have been sent to a psychologist, might perhaps have brought up a buried memory of the snap of elastic on a tanned thigh in a Moroccan restaurant, and the whole thing would have been dealt with. End of story.

“Your grandparents must never find out, my darling. They wouldn’t understand,” my mother said to me one day, quite lightly, in the middle of a conversation.