WE HAD BEEN CORRESPONDING BY LETTER SINCE THE beginning of our relationship, just like, I told myself naïvely, in the time of Les Liaisons dangereuses. G. had encouraged me to use this mode of communication from the start, partly because he was a writer, but also as a matter of security, and of course to protect our love from prying eyes and ears. I didn’t object; I was more comfortable in written than spoken language. I found it a natural way to express myself. I was very reserved with my classmates; I couldn’t bear to speak in public, to stand up in front of the class and give a presentation. I was incapable of participating in any theatrical or artistic activity that required that I expose my body to be looked at by other people. The internet and the mobile phone didn’t exist yet. The telephone inspired only disdain in G., who considered it a vulgar object devoid of any poetry. I kept the stack of flamboyant love letters that he used to send me whenever he went away, or when we hadn’t been able to see each other for a few days, carefully bound with ribbon in an old cardboard box. I know he treasured mine just as carefully. But when I began to read his books (still avoiding the most salacious), I realized that I was far from holding exclusive rights to these epistolary outpourings.

Two of his books recount G.’s tumultuous love affairs with a bevy of young girls whose advances he was apparently unable to refuse. These girlfriends of his were all very demanding, and, unable to work out how to extricate himself from them, he began juggling, in a truly acrobatic fashion, increasingly barefaced lies so that he could keep two, three, or even four trysts with his lovers in the same day.

Not only did G. not hesitate to reproduce in his books the letters he received from his conquests, but they all seemed strangely familiar: in their style, their enthusiasm, and even their vocabulary, it was as if they constituted a single body spread out across the years, in which the distant voice of a single idealized young girl, composed of all the others, could be heard. Each letter bore witness to a love as spiritual as that between Heloise and Abelard, and as carnal as that between Valmont and Tourvel. It was like reading the naïve, antiquated prose of lovers from a different century. These weren’t words of contemporary young women, but the universal and timeless terms taken from the epistolary literature of love. G. whispered them to us by stealth, breathing them onto our very tongues. He dispossessed us of our own words.

My own letters to G. do not stand out at all. Don’t all vaguely “literary” teenage girls between fourteen and eighteen write in exactly the same way? Or was I influenced by the uniform style of these love letters after I’d read some of the ones in G.’s books? I can’t help wondering if I was instinctively conforming to what you might call a “technical specification.”

With hindsight, I realize he was taking us all for fools: by reproducing from one book to the next letters from young girls in the full flower of youth, all with the same obsessiveness, G. was establishing not only an image of himself as seducer but also, more perniciously, testimony that he was not the monster people said he was. All these declarations of love were proof that he was loved, and, better still, that he knew how to love. What a hypocritical way it was of going about things, deceiving not only his young mistresses but also his readers. I eventually saw through the function of the dozens of letters he had written to me, frenetically, since our first meeting. For G., loving adolescents was also about being a writer, and the authority and the psychological hold he enjoyed were all that was needed for his nymphet of the moment to confirm in writing that she was fulfilled. A letter leaves a trace, and the recipient feels duty-bound to respond, and when it is composed with passionate lyricism, she must show herself to be worthy of it. With this silent injunction, the teenage girl would give herself the mission of reassuring G. regarding all the pleasure he gave her, so that in the event of a raid by the police, there could be no doubt that she was a consenting partner. He was, of course, a past master in the execution of the faintest caress. The unequaled heights of our orgasmic pleasure were proof of that!

Such declarations, from the young virgins who ended up in G.’s bed and hadn’t the slightest point of comparison, were actually rather comical.

Which was too bad for those devoted readers of his published diaries who let themselves be taken in.