An 83-year-old French writer once feted by the Paris intellectual set now finds himself ostracised because of his writings about sex with teenage boys and girls.
From the 1960s onwards, Gabriel Matzneff made no secret of his passion for seducing adolescents. But a new book by one of the teenagers he slept with in the 1980s has led to a criminal investigation for rape of a minor.
And now debate is raging in France about who is more to blame: Matzneff himself or the world he moved in.
Was it the man, or the moment?
The moment that Gabriel Matzneff realised that the moral wind was turning against him came on 2 March 1990 when he appeared on France’s famous TV book programme Apostrophe to discuss the latest of his published diaries.
The footage can easily be found on the internet. In a jocular tone the programme’s respected presenter, Bernard Pivot, asks Matzneff (then aged 53) what it is like to be a serial “collector of young chicks”.