IN 1974, TWELVE YEARS BEFORE WE MET, G. PUBLISHED an essay entitled Under Sixteen, a manifesto of sorts calling for the sexual liberation of minors, which simultaneously caused a scandal and made him famous. Though the scandal was extremely damaging, it endowed G.’s work with an inflammatory dimension that increased interest in his writing in general. While his friends thought it would be social suicide, it turned out that on the contrary, the book gave his literary career a boost, bringing him to the notice of a broader public.

I hadn’t read it and I didn’t grasp its import until many years after our relationship ended.

In the essay, G. championed the theory that the sexual initiation of children is a positive act that should be encouraged by society. The practice was widespread in antiquity, evidence of the ancients’ recognition of the right of adolescents to their freedom of choice and desire.

“The very young are tempting. They are also tempted. I have never stolen so much as a kiss or a caress by coercion or force,” he writes.

He must have forgotten the times when those kisses and caresses were paid for, in countries less punctilious about underage prostitution. If one were to believe the descriptions he jotted down in his black Moleskine notebooks, one might even be persuaded that Filipino children threw themselves at him through sheer greed, the way a child might pounce on a strawberry ice cream. (Unlike all those bourgeois Western children, the children of Manila are liberated.)

In Under Sixteen he militates for a complete liberalization of morals, an open-mindedness that would at last authorize an adult not to orgasm over an adolescent but with an adolescent. What a worthy project. Or the worst kind of sophistry. In the essay, and in the open letter that G. went on to publish three years later, when you look closely at what he says, it becomes clear that he is not defending the interests of adolescents, but those of adults “unjustly” convicted for having had sexual relationships with them.

The role that G. liked to give himself in his books was that of benefactor, responsible for the initiation of young people into the joys of sex; a professional, a veteran; in other words—if one might dare to be so bold—an expert. In reality, this exceptional talent was limited to not making his partner suffer. And where there is neither pain nor coercion, there is no rape. The challenge of the undertaking consists in respecting this golden rule, without exception. Physical violence leaves a memory for a person to react against. It’s appalling, but tangible.

Sexual abuse, on the other hand, is insidious and perverse, and the victim might be barely aware it is happening. No one speaks of “sexual abuse” between adults. Of the abuse of the vulnerable, yes, of an elderly person, for example. Vulnerability is precisely that infinitesimal space into which people with the psychological profile of G. can insinuate themselves. It’s the element that makes the notion of consent so beside the point. Very often, in the case of sexual abuse or abuse of the vulnerable, one comes across the same denial of reality, the same refusal to consider oneself a victim. And indeed, how is it possible to acknowledge having been abused when it’s impossible to deny having consented, having felt desire, for the very adult who was so eager to take advantage of you? For many years I struggled with the very idea of the victim, and was incapable of seeing myself as one.

G. was right about the fact that puberty and adolescence are periods of explosive sensuality: sex is everywhere, you’re overflowing with desire, it invades you, it’s like a wave, it has to be satisfied straightaway; all that’s needed is an encounter with another person to share it with.

But some differences are simply irresolvable. With all the goodwill in the world, an adult is still an adult. And an adult’s desire can only ever be a trap for an adolescent. How can both have the same level of understanding of their bodies, their desires? What’s more, a vulnerable adolescent is always going to seek love before sexual satisfaction. Sometimes, in exchange for an indication of affection (or the sum of money their family needs), an adolescent will agree to become the object of pleasure, thus renouncing, for a long time to come, the right to be the subject, actor, and master of their own sexuality.

What characterizes sexual predators in general and pedophiles in particular is the refusal to acknowledge the gravity of their acts. They tend to present themselves either as victims (they were seduced by a child, or a female temptress) or as benefactors (who did only good to their victims).

In Lolita, Nabokov’s novel, which I read and reread after I first met G., the reader is, on the contrary, confronted with confusing disclosures. Humbert Humbert pens his confession in the psychiatric hospital where he later dies, not long before his trial. He does not go easy on himself at all.

How lucky Lolita was: at least she obtained this compensation, the unambiguous recognition of her stepfather’s guilt, in the voice of the very person who had stolen her childhood. How unfortunate that she was already dead when he made his confession.

Nowadays I often hear it said that a work like Nabokov’s, were it to be published today, in our so-called neo-Puritan era, would inevitably encounter censorship. And yet I don’t think that Lolita is even remotely an apology for pedophilia. Quite the contrary: it’s the strongest possible denunciation of it—the most compelling ever written on the subject. I’ve never believed that Nabokov was a pedophile. Obviously, his persistent interest in such a subversive subject—which he tackled twice, first in The Enchanter, in his native Russian, then, several years later, in English, with the iconic Lolita, which garnered worldwide success—raised a few suspicions. Nabokov might indeed have struggled against such a predilection. I couldn’t possibly know. But despite all of Lolita’s subconscious perversity, despite her games of seduction and her starlet’s simpering, Nabokov never tried to make Humbert Humbert pass for a benefactor, and still less for a decent person. The tale of his character’s passion for young girls, an unrestrained and pathological passion that tortured him throughout his entire life, is, on the contrary, implacably clear-sighted.

In his books, G. comes across as far from contrite or self-questioning. Not a trace of regret or remorse. Reading him, you might imagine he was brought into this world to offer adolescents the fulfillment that a culture of inhibition denied them, to open them up to their desires, reveal their sensuality, develop their capacity to give and to receive.

Such a capacity for self-denial merits a statue in the Luxembourg Gardens.