G. PROTESTED WHEN I TOLD HIM THAT SOME OF THE people in my circle of friends called him a “sex maniac.” The expression troubled me. I considered his love for me to be of a sincerity that was above suspicion. Over time, I had read a few of his books—just the ones he recommended I read. The uncontroversial ones: the dictionary of philosophy that had just come out, and a few of the novels, though not all; he warned me off the more notorious ones. With a strength of conviction worthy of the finest politician, he swore, hand on heart, that those works no longer corresponded to the man he had become, thanks to me. Above all, he said, he was afraid that some pages might shock me. He said all this with the air of an innocent lamb.

I obeyed the ban for a long time. A couple of these forbidden books sat on the bookshelf by the bed, and their titles taunted me whenever I caught sight of them. But, like Bluebeard’s wife, I’d made a promise and I would stick to my word. Presumably because I didn’t have a nun watching over me to keep me on the straight and narrow if ever the idea of transgressing the forbidden crossed my mind.

Whenever I heard the terrible accusations made against him, some boundless naïveté made me believe that G. had created a fictional caricature of himself; that his books were a twisted exaggeration of the person he really was, that he demeaned himself in them, made himself look ugly, as a kind of provocation, like a larger-than-life character in a novel. A modern-day version of Dorian Gray’s portrait, his work was the receptacle of all his faults, a way of allowing him to return to his life revitalized, untouched, ironed out, pure.

How could he be a bad person, if I loved him? Thanks to him, I was no longer the little girl waiting on her own in a restaurant for her daddy to turn up. Thanks to him, at last, I existed.

That lack, that lack of love, like the thirst that makes a man drink down to the last drop, the thirst of a junkie who doesn’t check the quality of what he’s scored, who injects himself with a lethal dose with the conviction that it will make him feel better. Relief, recognition, rapture.