I WAS IN LOVE. I FELT ADORED AS NEVER BEFORE. AND that was enough to efface all my sullenness, and to suspend any judgment about our relationship.

After we’d been to bed, in those early days, there were two things I found particularly touching: seeing G. stand up to pee and watching him shave. It was as if those activities were, for the first time, part of my world, for too long restricted to feminine rituals.

What I discovered in G.’s embrace, the hitherto unfathomable domain of adult sexuality, was a whole new continent to me. I explored this male body with the concentration of a privileged disciple. I absorbed his lessons with gratitude, and I worked hard on my practical exercises. I felt I had been chosen.

G. confessed to me that he had until recently led a rather dissolute life, as some of his books bore out. He kneeled before me, his eyes misted with tears, and promised to break up with all his other mistresses, whispering that he had never in his whole life been so happy, that meeting me was a miracle, a veritable gift from the gods.

At the beginning, G. took me to museums and the theater, gave me records, told me what books to read. We would spend hours walking hand in hand along the paths in the Luxembourg Gardens, wandering the streets of Paris, ignoring all the looks—curious, suspicious, disapproving, sometimes openly hostile—of the people walking by us.

I don’t recall my parents often coming to pick me up from school, even when I was still at an age when I would wait, with a delicious squirm of anxiety, for the doors to open to one or the other of their beloved faces. My mother always worked late. I went home on my own after class. My father didn’t even know the name of the street where my school was.

Now G. waited outside school for me almost every day. Not right in front, but a few meters away, on the little square at the end of the street, so that I could spot him straightaway just beyond the crowd of overexcited teenagers. In springtime, his rangy silhouette was wrapped in a colonial-style safari jacket; in winter, an overcoat like those of Russian officers in the Second World War, full-length and covered in gold buttons. He wore sunglasses, summer and winter, to protect his anonymity.

Ours was a forbidden love. Reviled by all decent people. I knew this, because he told me so repeatedly. It meant I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone. I had to be careful. But why? Why, if I loved him and he loved me?

And were those sunglasses really so discreet?