G. WAS SUBDUED AND UNSMILING, WHICH WAS NOT LIKE him at all. We’d met up in one of our favorite cafés, opposite the Luxembourg Gardens. When I asked him what was eating him, he hesitated for a moment before admitting the truth. That morning he’d received a summons from the Juvenile Squad, after an anonymous letter concerning him had been received by them. It appeared we were not the only people to be sensitive to the charms of epistolary communication.

G. had spent the afternoon stashing all my letters and photographs (and quite possibly other things that were similarly compromising) in a safe-deposit box at his lawyer’s office. The summons was for the following week. Obviously, it concerned us, me. Legally, the age of consent was fifteen. I was a long way from turning fifteen. The situation was serious. We had to be prepared for every possible scenario. Had times changed? Were attitudes less liberal now?

The following Thursday my mother, her stomach in a knot of anxiety, sat waiting for news of the interview. She was aware that her responsibility as a parent was at stake. Having agreed to cover for the relationship between me and G., she also risked prosecution. She might even lose custody of me, in which case I would be placed in a foster home until I reached the age of majority.

She picked up the phone as soon as it rang, palpably apprehensive. After a few seconds her expression relaxed. “G.’s on his way over, he’ll be here in ten minutes, he sounded okay, I think it went well,” she said in a single breath.

G. came straight from the police station on the Quai de Gesvres, looking rather amused and pleased with himself at how he’d managed to pull the wool over the eyes of the police inspector and her colleagues. “It all went very well,” he crowed as soon as he arrived. “The police assured me it was just a bureaucratic formality. ‘We receive hundreds of letters denouncing high-profile people every day, you understand, Monsieur,’ the inspector told me.” As usual, G. was convinced it was all thanks to his irresistible charm. Which was, indeed, not implausible.

At the police station he was shown the letter that had alerted them. Signed “W., a friend of the girl’s mother,” it described in minute detail some of our recent activities. The specific showing of a movie we’d been to. The day and time I’d arrived at his apartment, and my return to my mother’s apartment two hours later. The detailed account of our debauchery was punctuated by judgments along the lines of, “Have you any idea how shameful this is? He genuinely appears to believe himself above the law,” and so on. A classic anonymous letter, a model of its kind, virtually a parody. I was horrified. In one strange detail, the letter made me a year younger than I was, presumably to accentuate the gravity of the facts. It spoke of a “young girl of thirteen called V.” Who was it who could have spent so much time spying on us? And then there was this strange signature, like a clue placed there for us to guess the author. Otherwise why the initial?

My mother and G. immediately began wildly speculating. We considered every single one of our friends as the potential author of this poison pen missive. Perhaps it was our neighbor on the second floor, an elderly lady who used to be a literature teacher, and who sometimes used to take me to the Comédie Française on a Wednesday afternoon when we didn’t have school. Might she have caught us kissing each other full on the lips on the corner of the street? She would have recognized G. (don’t forget, she was a literature teacher), and of course she had lived through the Occupation, when plenty of people shamelessly informed on their neighbors in anonymous letters. But it was the “W” that confused us; it was a bit too modern for her. Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood would definitely not have been included in Madame Latreille’s literary pantheon; her references would only have gone up to the end of the nineteenth century.

What about the famous literary critic Jean-Didier Wolfromm? He was probably skilled at literary pastiche, as is often the case with people unable to write in the first person. Or unable to write at all, even though it’s their profession. “It has to be him,” said G. “Look, it’s his initial. And he’s a friend of your mother, and he took you under his wing.”

It was true, Jean-Didier did occasionally invite me to lunch, and he encouraged me to write, who knows why. “V., you must write,” he often used to say to me. “To write, well, perhaps this is going to sound idiotic, but you start by sitting down and then . . . you write. Every day. Without exception.”

Every room in his apartment was filled to overflowing with books. I always left with a pile under my arm, copies he’d been sent by the publicity departments of publishing houses. He’d make me a little selection. Give me suggestions. Even though he had a reputation for being ungenerous and vindictive, I liked him enormously. He was terribly funny, often at others’ expense, but I really couldn’t imagine him doing something like this. Attacking G. was the same as attacking me.

I suppose because my father had now completely abandoned me, Jean-Didier had started keeping a benevolent eye on me. I knew he was lonely. I’d seen the tub in his apartment, violet-stained from his daily permanganate bath to treat a ghastly skin condition: his face and hands were red and inflamed, crisscrossed with light cracks. He had extraordinary hands. They fascinated me; he was so comfortable holding a pen, even though his hands were contorted from polio on top of everything else. Curiously, I wasn’t repelled by his physical appearance; I always gave him a warm hug. Behind the suffering and the cruel facade, I knew there was someone kind and generous.

“I’m convinced it’s that bastard,” G. thundered. “He’s always been jealous of me because he’s a monster. He cannot stand the fact that it’s possible to be both handsome and talented. I’ve always found him quite repulsive. And I’m sure he fantasizes about sleeping with you.”

But wouldn’t signing himself “W.” make it a bit obvious? He might as well have signed his full name. I tried to defend poor Jean-Didier, even though privately I had to admit that he probably was sufficiently twisted to have thought up such a ruse, if the objective was to have G. thrown into prison.

“Or might it be Denis,” G. speculated. Denis was a publisher, yet another friend of my mother.

One evening he’d been invited for dinner at our apartment with some other guests. When G. arrived, he stood up and aggressively confronted him. My mother had to ask him to leave. He didn’t need to be asked twice. He was one of the very few people—perhaps the only one—who ever tried to get between G. and me, who expressed his outrage publicly. Might he have written this poison pen letter? It wasn’t really his style. Why, having attacked G. to his face, would he employ such underhanded tactics?

“What about my old primary school teacher? She still lives in the neighborhood, and we’ve stayed close. I’ve never told her about you, but perhaps she spotted us in the street holding hands. She’d be just the type to throw a fit like that. Or the other publisher, Martial, the one with the office on the ground floor where we live, in the courtyard: he’s had a hundred opportunities to spy on us coming and going.” We hardly knew him. Was it possible that he was the friend of the girl’s mother?

My classmates from school? Too young to do something so sophisticated. Not their style.

But what about my father? I hadn’t heard from him at all since he’d made that scene at the hospital. A few years earlier he’d been thinking of setting up a private detective agency. Maybe he’d decided to put his plan into operation in order to have his daughter followed? I couldn’t help thinking that was a possibility. I concealed from G., and presumably from myself too, that deep down this idea gave me a certain pleasure. After all, isn’t a father’s role to protect his daughter? At least it would indicate that I still mattered to him. But why use the convoluted means of an anonymous letter, rather than simply going straight to the Juvenile Squad? Absurd. No, it couldn’t be him. But then again, anything was possible. He was terribly unpredictable.

In two hours, we went through all our acquaintances, conjuring up the most unlikely scenarios. By the end of my first council of war, my entire social circle had become suspect. Not a single one of G.’s enemies was suspected of being the author of the letter. Too many details about me. “It has to be one of your friends,” G. declared, fixing my mother with an icy glare.

G. was summoned four more times to the Juvenile Squad. The police received a whole series of letters like the first, but increasingly loaded, filled with more and more intrusive details, spread out over several months. G. would have been shown most of them, if not all.

As far as my mother’s close friends were concerned, our relationship was an open secret, but beyond those favored few, we were obliged to exercise great caution. We had to be exceedingly discreet. I was beginning to feel like a hunted animal. The sense of being constantly observed gave birth to a sentiment of paranoia, to which was added a persistent feeling of guilt.

I kept my head down when I was in the street, took increasingly convoluted detours on my way to see G. We made sure never to arrive at the same time. He would get there first, and I would turn up half an hour later. We stopped holding hands when we were together. We no longer walked across the Luxembourg Gardens. After the third summons to the prefecture on the Quai de Gesvres, still “merely a formality,” according to the police, G. was starting to seem genuinely nervous.

One afternoon I had just left his apartment, his bed, we were both hurrying down the stairs, I was late, and I almost bumped into a young couple who were on their way up. I politely nodded a greeting to them and continued running down the stairs. When they reached G., I heard them address him. “Monsieur M.? We’re from the Juvenile Squad.” Apparently even the police watch literary programs on the television, because these two clearly recognized him immediately, even though they had never met before. “It is I,” he replied, in a voice that was suave and relaxed. “How may I help you?” I was amazed by his composure. I was trembling like a leaf. Should I run out of the building, hide in the stairwell, call out something in his defense, loudly declare my love for him, create a diversion so he could escape? I realized almost immediately that nothing like that would be necessary.

The tone of the conversation was cordial.

“We were hoping to be able to speak to you, Monsieur M.”

“Of course, but as it happens, I have a signing at a bookshop. Might you be able to come back another time?”

“Of course, Monsieur M.”

G. gestured in my direction, and said, “Would you mind if I just say goodbye to this young student who came to speak to me about my work?” He shook my hand and gave me a slow wink.

“It’s only a routine visit,” said the woman.

“Ah, so you mean you haven’t come to arrest me.” Laughter.

“Of course not, Monsieur M. We’ll be back tomorrow, if that suits you.”

G. didn’t need to worry about them conducting a search. His studio no longer bore the slightest trace of my presence in his life. But, if I had understood correctly, we had only just avoided being caught in flagrante delicto.

Why did neither of the police officers pay any attention to me? I was a teenage girl. The letters all talked of a “young girl of thirteen called V.” Admittedly I was actually fourteen, and perhaps I looked a little older.

All the same, it’s astounding that it didn’t even occur to them.