THE WEEK FOLLOWING OUR FIRST MEETING, I WAS DESPERATE to get to a bookshop. When I did, it was to buy one of G.’s books, though I was surprised when the bookseller advised against the one I’d selected at random and pointed me to a different work by the same author. “This one would be more suitable for you, I think,” he said, rather enigmatically. A black-and-white photograph of G. punctuated a long frieze of portraits of writers in the same format, a shrine to all the important authors of the day, which ran around the four walls of the bookshop. I opened the book at the first page, and my eyes fell upon another unsettling coincidence: the first sentence—not the second, not the third, but the very first, the one the text opens with, the famous beginning with which generations of writers have struggled—began with my exact date of birth, the very day, month, and year: “On Thursday, 16 March 1972, the clock in the Luxembourg station chimed half past twelve.” If that wasn’t a sign! As excited as I was surprised, I left the bookshop clutching the precious volume under my arm, pressing it against my heart as though destiny had gifted it to me.

I devoured the novel over the next two days. Though it contained nothing shocking (the bookseller had chosen well), it did contain open allusions to the fact that the narrator was rather more susceptible to the beauty of young girls than that of women his own age. I stared into space, thinking how privileged I was to have met such a talented man of letters, so glamorous too (in truth, it was the memory of the way he looked at me that made my heart soar), and I began to see myself differently. Looking in the mirror now, I thought I was quite pretty. The toad, whose reflection used to make me flee what I saw in shop windows, vanished. How could I not feel flattered that a man—not any man, an actual “man of letters”—had deigned to lay his eyes on me? Since childhood, books had been my siblings, my companions, my tutors, my friends. With my blind veneration of the “Writer” with a capital “W,” it was almost inevitable that I would conflate the man with his status as an artist.

I used to pick up the mail every day and take it up to the apartment. The gardienne would hand it to me when I walked in from school. One day, among a handful of official-looking envelopes, I saw my name and address inscribed in turquoise ink, with beautiful handwriting that sloped upward and slightly to the left, as if the words were trying to take flight. On the back, in the same cerulean ink, I read G.’s first and last names.

It was the first of what would be a great many letters, exquisitely charming and dripping with compliments. There was one important detail—G. always used the formal vous, just as if I were a grown-up. This was the first time that someone in my circle, apart from my schoolteachers, had ever used vous to address me, and it flattered my ego while at the same time instantly placing me on an equal footing with him. I didn’t dare reply. But G. was not a man to be so easily discouraged. He sometimes wrote to me twice a day. I took to dropping into the gardienne’s lodge morning and evening, terrified that my mother would come across one of these letters, which I kept on me at all times like a secret treasure, careful never to mention them to anyone. Eventually, after repeated solicitations, I plucked up the courage to pen a response to him, prim and shy but a response all the same. I had just turned fourteen. He was almost fifty. What of it?

No sooner had I nibbled at the bait than G. pounced. He began looking out for me in the street, wandering back and forth all over the neighborhood, trying to bring about an impromptu encounter, which occurred soon enough. We exchanged a few words, and then I walked home, dazed with love. I grew used to the possibility of bumping into him at any moment, so much so that his invisible presence accompanied me on my walk to school, on my way home, when I went shopping at the market or hung out with my friends. One day he sent me a letter arranging to meet. The telephone was far too dangerous, he wrote, it might be my mother who answered.

He asked me to meet him at Saint-Michel, by the number 27 bus stop. I was on time, and on edge, sensing that I was committing an enormous transgression. I’d imagined us going to a café somewhere in the neighborhood. To chat, get to know each other a bit. But as soon as he arrived, he told me he wanted to invite me to “afternoon tea” at his apartment. He’d bought some delicious pastries from a prohibitively expensive patisserie, whose name he uttered with greedy relish. All for me. Nonchalantly, he carried on talking as he crossed the street. I followed him mechanically, light-headed with words, and found myself at the stop for the same line going in the other direction. The bus pulled up. G. motioned me to get on, saying with a smile that I mustn’t be afraid. His tone of voice was reassuring. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you!” My hesitation seemed to disappoint him.

I wasn’t prepared for this. Incapable of reacting, caught off guard, I simply could not bear to seem like an idiot. Nor could I bear to be taken for a little kid who knew nothing about life. “You mustn’t pay any attention to all the dreadful things people say about me. Come on, get on!” My hesitation had nothing to do with anything that anybody I knew had said. No one had said anything dreadful about him because I hadn’t told anyone about our meeting.

As the bus sped down the Boulevard Saint-Michel and past the Luxembourg Gardens, G. smiled at me beatifically, threw me amorous, knowing glances, gazed at me adoringly. It was a beautiful day. Two stops later we pulled up to his apartment building. This wasn’t what I had imagined either. Couldn’t we walk for a while?

The staircase was narrow, there was no elevator, and we had to climb up to the sixth floor. “I live in a maid’s room in the attic. I expect you imagine all writers to be very rich men; well, as you shall see, literature rarely provides enough to sustain a person. But I am very happy here. I live like a student and that suits me perfectly. Luxury and comfort do not breed inspiration.”

There wasn’t room to walk up six flights side by side. On the outside I was dreadfully calm, but inside my chest my heart was thumping like a drum.

He must have guessed I was afraid because he went ahead of me, presumably so I didn’t feel trapped and still felt I could turn around and go back down. For a moment I imagined running away, but as we walked up the stairs, G. carried on chatting cheerfully, like a young man excited to be inviting a young girl up to his studio for the first time, having only just met her ten minutes earlier. His gait was agile, athletic; at no point did he appear out of breath. The physical condition of a sportsman.

The door opened onto an untidy studio with a spartan kitchen area at one end, so poky there was barely room for a chair. It had the means to make a cup of tea, but not so much as a pan to boil an egg.

“This is where I write,” he declared solemnly. And there, on a tiny table wedged between the sink and the refrigerator, a pile of blank pages and a typewriter had pride of place. The room smelled of incense and dust. A ray of sunlight came through the window. A miniature bronze Buddha sat on a pedestal table that was missing a foot, propped up on a pile of books. A sad-looking elephant, its trunk aloft, a souvenir from a trip to India, seemed a little lost on the floor where a small Persian carpet skirted the parquet. A pair of Tunisian babouches, and books, more books, dozens of piles of books of all sizes, colors, thicknesses, and breadths, were strewn across the floor. G. invited me to sit down. There was only one place where two people could sit side by side—the bed.

Perched there, primly, my feet riveted to the floor, palms flat on my squeezed-together knees, back upright, I searched his face for a sign that would enlighten me as to the reason I was there. For several minutes my heart had been racing faster and faster, unless of course it was time itself whose rhythm had changed. I could have stood up and left. I wasn’t afraid of G. He would never force me to stay against my will, I was sure of that. I felt an ineluctable shift in the situation and yet I didn’t stand up, and I didn’t say anything. G. was moving as if in a dream. I didn’t see him come toward me, but suddenly he was there, sitting next to me, his arms around my trembling shoulders.

That first afternoon in his studio, G. behaved with exquisite delicacy. He kissed me tenderly, stroked my shoulders, slipped his hand under my sweater without asking me to take it off, though eventually I did. We were like two shy adolescents messing around in the back of a car. I lay there, languid but inhibited, incapable of the slightest movement, the faintest boldness. I concentrated on his lips, his mouth, touched his face with the tips of my fingers as he propped himself over me. Time stretched out until eventually, cheeks ablaze, lips and heart swollen with an utterly unfamiliar joy, I left and went home.