Paris (AFP)

Everything Gabriel Matzneff - the man, his work and the smell of sulfur that accompanies it - seems contained in his 1974 essay, "The under sixteen years", which describes his attraction for adolescents of both sexes.

The 83-year-old writer with a shaved head is the subject of an investigation for "rape committed against a minor", opened Friday by the Paris prosecutor's office the day after the publication of the book by the editor Vanessa Springora, which tells of her relationship under the influence of the author, in the mid-1980s, when she was barely 14 years old.

This judicial turning point openly poses the question of tolerance after May 68 of a part of the intelligentsia and the media vis-à-vis pedophilia and of a very popular author in the 70s.

"Why couldn't a 14-year-old girl love a man 36 years older than her?" Wonders Vanessa Springora in "Le Consentement" (Grasset), only to realize that the question is "badly asked": " It was not my attraction that I had to question, but hers. "

The writer sees in it a "hostile, malicious, disparaging work" and not the story of what he describes for his part as "bright and burning loves".

"No, it is not me, it is not what we have lived together, and you know it," he said in a text transmitted to the Express. He accuses the publisher of "throwing him into the cursed cauldron into which the photographer Hamilton, the filmmakers Woody Allen and Roman Polanski were thrown".

- Arrested during "Apostrophes" -

"The Consent" relaunches the debate between the accusers of the writer - who has never been tried - and his defenders, which he never failed in the literary world.

The controversy is illustrated by this video archive that went viral, dating from 1990 on the set of the literary program "Apostrophes". Interrogated by the Canadian writer Denise Bombardier, who judges that he would have had "accounts to justice" if he did not have "a literary aura", Matzneff counters that he finds it intolerable that it concerns his work a moral rather than literary judgment.

The Quebecer will be more criticized than the erudite writer with courteous manners, willingly funny and provocative - a reflection of a bygone era, almost 30 years before the #Metoo era.

"Sulfurous and free writers are essential to the breathing of the nation," said this great reader of Stoics.

The one who targeted his meetings in the 1970s at the very chic Deligny swimming pool in Paris, has published ten novels, collections of poems, four stories, fifteen essays, a huge diary, two volumes of email. Books widely translated, even if he only sold 1,000 copies of the 14th volume of his Journal, the 15th having been released at the end of 2019.

The atmosphere of the Russian white circles of Paris occupies an important place in the books of this writer born on August 12, 1936 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, in a family resulting from the Russian emigration caused by the Revolution of 1917. After the divorce of his parents, his childhood takes place in a cultivated environment.

- Mitterrand admiring but careful -

In 1954, he studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne, formed a "stormy friendship", in his words, with Henry de Montherlant.

After his military service in Algeria and in mainland France, he attempted suicide and was interned for two months in neuro-psychiatry.

He writes in "Combat", deepens his knowledge of the Orthodox religion, travels, gets married, divorces. In 1965, his first essay "Le Défi" appeared, followed a year later by his first novel, "L'Archimandrite".

Over the years, books and romantic encounters will succeed. Each is the occasion for a page, a chapter, a book.

In 1989, President François Mitterrand wrote about him, admiring but careful: "I knew him when he was a very young author, lively, serious and light, a little literary (...). I lost the character he has become, never the writer he has remained. "

Columnist since 2013 of Point.fr on spirituality and religions, he received that year the Renaudot of the essay - his first literary prize - for "Séraphin, c'est la fin". The jury wanted to "show compassion", explains today one of its members, Frédéric Beigbeder, while recognizing an "awkward" choice.

© 2020 AFP