PARIS — Gabriel Matzneff, the French writer under investigation for his promotion of pedophilia, was holed up this month inside a luxury hotel room on the Italian Riviera, unable to relax, unable to sleep, unable to write. He was alone and in hiding, abandoned by the same powerful people in publishing, journalism, politics and business who had protected him weeks earlier. He went outside only for solitary walks behind dark sunglasses and was startled when I tracked him down in a cafe mentioned in his books.
“I feel like the living dead, a dead man walking, walking on the lungomare,” he said, referring in Italian to the seafront promenade, in a long conversation, after some persuading.
Lindy Chamberlain
In a case that was immortalized in the Meryl Streep movie "A Cry in the Dark", Chamberlain was convicted of murdering her nine-week-old daughter and spent three years in prison. She had claimed that a dingo had taken her baby while the Chamberlain family was on a camping trip.
In 2012 Chamberlain was acquitted of all charges levelled against her and offered US $1.3 million in compensation by the Australian government for wrongful imprisonment. The coroner determined that the baby had been attacked and taken by a dingo.
Josyane Savigneau, who was editor of a literary supplement of the French newspaper Le Monde from 1991 to 2005, publicly chided Ms. Bombardier and defended Mr. Matzneff’s work.
In a recent interview, Ms. Savigneau recalled being revolted by some of Mr. Matzneff’s writings, but said his books were superior to others that landed on her desk.
“I saw him as a man who liked young women,” she said. “In France, he was never seen with boys.”
Philippe Sollers, a famous novelist and Mr. Matzneff’s chief editor at Gallimard, later dismissed Ms. Bombardier with a crude sexual term. Mr. Sollers did not respond to a request for an interview.
The only public support for Ms. Bombardier came from an unexpected corner: President Mitterrand.
Ms. Bombardier recalled that she was invited to the presidential palace, where Mr. Mitterrand told her that though he had once “recognized qualities” in Mr. Matzneff, the author had unfortunately “sunk” into “pedophilia.”
Floundering
Though he kept churning out books, Mr. Matzneff was far from wealthy and turned to his powerful friends.
By 2002, Mr. Girard, the aide to Yves Saint Laurent, had become the deputy for culture to the mayor of Paris. (He is now serving again in the position.) He lobbied intensely for Mr. Matzneff to win a seldom-awarded lifetime annual stipend from the National Book Center, the center’s current director, Vincent Monadé, told the newspaper L’Opinion.
By 2005, the original publisher of Mr. Matzneff’s 1974 apology of pedophilia balked at republishing it. Mr. Matzneff said that another longtime ally — a powerful lawyer and author named Emmanuel Pierrat — introduced him to another publisher who gave it a second life.
“I don’t disown a single line in it, not a word,” Mr. Matzneff wrote in a preface to the 2005 edition.
Mr. Pierrat, who is now representing Mr. Matzneff, is also president of the PEN Club in France and secretary general of the Yves Saint Laurent Museum. He did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls requesting an interview.
By 2013, Mr. Matzneff’s views were no longer fashionable. His books barely sold. He had learned the year before that he had prostate cancer.
But even in his despair, he could still pull on some old strings.
© Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times Mr. Matzneff said he did not know when he would return to Paris. A major literary award, the Renaudot, had twice slipped through his fingers despite the fierce maneuverings of one juror: Mr. Giudicelli, the writer to whom Mr. Matzneff had entrusted incriminating photos and letters of the 14-year-old Ms. Springora when he feared a police raid.
Besides being a friend, Mr. Giudicelli was also one of Mr. Matzneff’s editors at Gallimard and a frequent traveling companion to Manila.
Gallimard did not make Mr. Giudicelli, or anybody else at the publishing house, available for an interview.
So close are the two men that they referred to each other by the rooms they occupied on their first stay at the Tropicana Hotel in Manila.
“When it comes to conjuring up, here and there, in a short paragraph, memories of mischief and naughtiness about which we hardly feel guilty, my dear Eight-oh-four takes care to conceal his dear Christian under the protective wing of Eight-one-one,” Mr. Giudicelli writes about his friend.
In 2013, Mr. Giudicelli helped secure his friend the Renaudot prize, after studiously confiding Mr. Matzneff’s cancer diagnosis to his fellow jurors.
“It’s an argument we heard a lot: ‘He needs it, the poor guy,’” recalled one of the jurors, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, a writer and editor.
Dominique Bona, the only woman in the 10-member jury and a member of the French Academy, acknowledged that “friendships” played a part in awarding the prize to Mr. Matzneff.
Mr. Busnel, the host of “La Grande Librairie,” said recently, “Literary juries in France are totally corrupt.”
But the prize relaunched Mr. Matzneff’s career — eventually even earning him an invitation to appear on “La Grande Librairie.”
A rare critical voice came from a literary blogger, Juan Asensio, who wrote a scathing piece on the award and Mr. Matzneff’s pedophilia.
“I think that journalists sort of chickened out rather than saying the prize was a scandal,” he recalled.
Consent
One person was especially furious at the prize: Vanessa Springora. Angered and disgusted by Mr. Matzneff’s triumphant return, she began writing “Le Consentement.”
“Me, who had never won an important prize, she should have been happy for me,” Mr. Matzneff said. “But it made her angry?”
Mr. Matzneff said he learned in November of the imminent release of “Le Consentement” from friends at Grasset, the book’s publisher. He soon left for Italy as Ms. Springora’s book landed like a thunderbolt in a newly awakened France.
Alone in his hiding place on the Italian Riviera, Mr. Matzneff said he did not know when he would return to Paris. Other than his walks on the lungomare, he dines alone in the hotel restaurant. Up in his room, he rereads old, unpublished diaries. He will not, he says, read Ms. Springora’s book. He suffers from insomnia. He doesn’t write.
“I’m too miserable,” he said.
In Paris, it was now Ms. Springora’s turn in prime time, live, as she ascended to the studio of “La Grande Librairie.”
What began with a book could end only with a book. Only in France.
“My goal actually was to lock him up in a book, to catch him in his own trap,” Ms. Springora said on the show, “because that’s what he did to me and that’s what he did to many young girls.”
FULL ARTICLE AT:
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/indepth/a-pedophile-writer-is-on-trial-so-is-the-french-elite/ar-BBZSHsO?li=BBoPU0R
Daphné Anglès and Constant Méheut contributed reporting.
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