IN THE END, G.’S STAY IN THE HOSPITAL WAS BRIEF. AFTER having put to bed the rumor that he had AIDS (easier once he knew for sure he didn’t), he took to sporting even larger sunglasses, all the time, and carrying a cane. I began to understand the game he was playing. He loved to dramatize his situation, look for sympathy. Every episode in his life was an opportunity to be instrumentalized.

For the launch of his new book, G. was invited onto the most celebrated books program on television, a mecca for authors. He invited me to go with him.

In the taxi taking us to the television studio, my nose pressed to the window, my distracted glance tracked the century-old facades as they unspooled in the glow of the streetlamps: monuments, trees, passersby, lovers. It was dusk. G. was, as usual, wearing dark glasses. But behind the opaque lenses I could sense his hostile eyes on me.

“What made you decide to put on makeup?” he said finally.

“I . . . I don’t know . . . this evening, it’s such a special occasion, I wanted to look pretty, for you, to make you happy—”

“And what makes you think that I want to see you looking like a painted lady? You want to look like a ‘grown-up,’ is that it?”

“G., no, I just wanted to look nice for you, that’s all—”

“But I like you to look natural, don’t you understand? You don’t need to do that. I don’t like you like that.”

I swallowed my tears, humiliated in front of the driver, who must have thought my father was quite right to tell me off like that. All tarted up, at my age! To go where, again?

Everything was ruined. The evening was going to be a disaster. My mascara had run and now I really did look terrible. I would be introduced to new people, adults who’d look all knowing when they saw me on G.’s arm; I’d have to smile to make him look good, like I did every time he introduced me to his friends. And all the while I felt like slitting my wrists there and then; he’d broken my heart saying I was no longer to his taste.

An hour later, in the studio where the recording was to take place—after we’d kissed and made up, after he’d covered me in kisses and called me his “beloved child,” his “beautiful schoolgirl”—I took my place in the audience, overflowing with pride.

Three years later, in 1990, G. was invited back onto the same program, called Apostrophes. This time he was called out. I watched part of it several years later on the internet. This episode is rather better known than the one I saw live, because this time G. had not been invited to talk about his inoffensive philosophical dictionary, but the latest volume of his diaries.

In an extract that can still be seen online, the celebrity presenter of the program reels off a list of G.’s conquests, teasing him, in a tone of mild disapproval, about “the stable of young lovers” G. boasts about in his diary.

As the camera cuts away, you see the other guests laughing, not even pretending to disapprove, as the presenter, all fired up now, remarks wryly: “You are, it must be said, something of a connoisseur of teenage girls.”

It’s all very lighthearted up to that point. Knowing laughter, G.’s face flushed with false modesty.

Suddenly one of the guests lashes out, destroying this delightful harmony and unceremoniously launching a full-frontal attack. Her name is Denise Bombardier. She’s a Canadian writer. She says she’s scandalized by the presence of such a vile person on a French television channel, a pervert known for defending pedophilia. Citing the age of the best-known of G.M.’s mistresses (“Fourteen!”), she adds that in her country such behavior would be unimaginable, that Canadians are far more progressive when it comes to children’s rights. And how do the girls he describes in his books get on with their lives afterward? Has anyone given a thought to them?

G. appears taken aback by her attack, but his response is instantaneous. Coldly furious, he corrects her: “There is not a single fourteen-year-old girl among them; a few are two or three years older, which is absolutely the appropriate age to discover love.” (She can’t argue, he knows his criminal code.) Then he suggests that she is fortunate to have come across a man as polite and well-mannered as he, who will not stoop to her level of abuse, before finishing up by saying—as he waves his hands around in that feminine way he has that’s meant to make him seem quite unthreatening—that not a single one of the young ladies has ever complained about her relationship with him.

Game over. The famous male writer has beaten the virago, who is dismissed as a sex-starved harridan, jealous of the happiness of young women so much more fulfilled than she.

If G. had suffered such an attack in my presence on the evening when I was listening in silence in the audience, how might I have reacted? Would I instinctively have come to his defense? After the recording, would I have tried to explain to this woman that she was wrong, and that no, I was not there against my will? Would I have understood that it was I, hidden among the other spectators, or another young woman like me, whom this woman was trying to protect?

But on that first occasion there was no altercation, no false note to disturb the great event. G.’s book was too high-minded; it didn’t lend itself to that. A concert of congratulations, then a drink backstage. G. introduced me to everyone, as was his wont, with undisguised pride. Another nice way of confirming the truth of what he wrote. Adolescent girls were an integral part of his life. And no one appeared in the least bit shocked or embarrassed by the contrast between G. and my plump, girlish cheeks, bare of makeup and any signs of age.

With hindsight, I realize how much courage the Canadian writer must have mustered in order to stand up alone against the complacency of an entire era. Today, time has done its work, and this clip from Apostrophes has become what’s known as a television “moment.”

It’s been a long time since G. has been invited onto a book program to flaunt his schoolgirl conquests.