ELIJAH AND PHAETHON, 1970-73
BY GABRIEL MATZNEFF
Élie et Phaéton. Journal 1970-1973 (Elijah and Phaethon. Journal 1970-1973) is the fourth of the twelve published journals of the prize-winning French writer Gabriel Michel Hippolyte Matzneff (born 12 August 1936). It was published by La Table ronde in Paris in 1991.
Presented here are all the passages in it of Greek love interest concerning the large majority of the time that Matzneff was in France. Short passages concerning his stays in Egypt, Italy and Tunisia are presented separately, but linked in what follows so that the reader can read the journals in chronological order. The translation is this website’s.
Most of the extracts which follow concern the three-way love affair of Matzneff, his wife and the English schoolboy Mike M. in 1972. This had earlier been described in fictional form in Matzneff’s novel Isaïe réjouis-toi (Isaiah rejoice), published in 1974, where the three are called respectively Nil Kolytcheff, Véronique and Anthony Edleston.
1970
On 8th January 1970, Matzneff married Tatiana Scherbatcheff, his mistress of many years, in London. They returned the same day to Paris, where all the episodes of 1970 recounted here were set.
27 February. Frédérique Dupuy, with whom I would willingly fall in love, then Frédéric Mitterand[1], with whom I would assuredly have fallen in love if I had known him when he was thirteen or fourteen. Frédérique and Frédéric. [p. 30]
16 March, in the metro. This boy is so beautiful that to look at him is already to sin. If he looked at me, I would blush. But he ignores me, all to his chum, to their jokes and their crystalline laughter. [p. 33]
12 June. […] Dinner at the Struves.[2] […] They watched Orfeu Negro on tv. I went up to the boys’ bedroom. Aliocha grows up and becomes a ravishing boy. [p. 40]
Tuesday 10 [November. …]
In the afternoon, again at Guy Béart’s for a “Welcome” where we are Jacques Chancel’s guests: there are … Roger Peyrefitte[3] who talks to me very graciously of Like fire mixed with aromatics, as well as of Montherlant[4] with whom, like me, he alternates periods of friendship and anger. [p. 64]
Night of 9 to 10 [December]. Interesting dream. […] I found myself again in the restaurant where, after a modest meal, I’m presented with the bill, which amounts to six hundred francs. I protested and ended up paying the owner and her daughter by sleeping with them. Here the dream became very specific, as my erotic dreams always are, and the range of my favourite caresses came through. A little boy arrived (probably Gilles C.[5] when he was twelve, but I’m not sure) and I slept with him too. We were no longer in a restaurant but in a country house (?). Very pleasant atmosphere, airy, without anxiety or tension. [...]
Kim on television. When I was fifteen, I was madly in love with the character of Kim, or rather the American boy who played the role, Dean Stockwell. To this day, I can’t see that lovely face without emotion.
Night of the 12th to the 13th. Two more dreams, one immoral, the other funny.
I am in a college (in Nice?), but not as a pupil: I am the G.M. of today, the adult, the writer. I leave with a boy of eleven or twelve who, while walking, strokes my fly. I’m a bit embarrassed, I’m afraid we’ll be seen. He takes me to his home (all very cheerful, allegretto). Tatiana is there. We wash, then make love, all three of us. [pp. 72-4]
1971
In March, Matzneff was in Egypt. Readers wishing to read about his time there should here turn to Matzneff in Luxor, 1971.
[4 July] I can see why Montherlant is thinking of killing himself, for his life is not an amusing one: that of an old gentleman who trots around in a narrow circle (Gallimard, Marguerite Lauze’s flat, the Academy, the restaurants on the Quai Voltaire), whose infirmities render him unfit for the pursuit of happiness and who is bored. However, he refuses to leave his lodge where, as he explained to me, his records and folders are keeping him! Why on earth doesn’t Montherlant leave all this behind, rent a palace in Marrakech or a beautiful house in Tangiers? There he would be surrounded by servants and gitons, his publisher and friends would come to see him, his reputation as a writer would not be damaged and his last years would be more carefree and happy than they are here. [p. 143]
Tuesday [20 July], on the train to Monsoult. A mother with her four children, a boy and three girls, very beautiful. Brown, tanned, splendid eyes. The boy very little lord, scruffy chic, dirty sweet face, hair like Murillo’s shepherd’s. Dark hair, mat and golden tint, light eyes. Sky blue shirt, pink pocket handkerchief, fairly long shorts, English style. The boy, twelve years old; the girl, ten years old, already a she-cat, a caresser. Brother and sister, or cousins. Infinite curiosity of this family. The mother, tanned, is also charming.
Tatiana, immersed in a book, hardly pays them any attention. Julie would be more my accomplice.
He comes from Switzerland, alone (snatches of conversation). His name is Stéphane. With the superb and cruel indifference of their age, neither he nor she has a glance for me. They get down at Domont. It’s over. [p. 146]
In August, Matzneff and his wife spent about a fortnight in Venice. Readers wishing to read about his time there should turn to Matzneff in Italy, 1962-73.
Back in Paris, Matzneff reflected …
I will have known everything: the love of girls and that of young boys, the joys of creation, the most subtle religious emotions... Seen from the outside, my life is a complete success. But as I scribble these words, I am not happy. [p. 159]
1972
5 April. At church, then at the Struves’. Mike M., fifteen or sixteen years old, very beautiful. Pink cheeks, mass of blond hair, rather strong nose, full red lips on white teeth, willing chin. The girls must be mad about him. If Tatiana wanted to sleep with him, I would find it natural. […]
Easter Sunday. It’s time for Mike to return to England, and for me to fly to the Tunisia south, because I’m falling in love with him. So is Tatiana, for that matter. We talk about it and laugh. When he smiles, who can resist him? He looks like adolescent Byron, and also like my little English boy from the summer of 1962 in Venice. He is tender, needs tenderness, and surely it would not be difficult to... But the circumstances do not lend themselves to this. That night, in church, I kissed him fiercely, and this morning too, on waking up (we all slept at the Struves’, he was as fresh as a rose).
I take him to Father Besse’s home on the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, explaining to him that it’s a high place of French civilisation, that it’s as important as his visits to the Louvre or Notre-Dame. Long conversation with the wonderful Mr. Besse. I love Mike’s English accent, the way he speaks French. We buy a 1964 Chateau Trottevieille.
In the afternoon, Tatiana, Mike, Alyosha and I are at home. We take photos. Mike’s poignant beauty. All this, fragile. In six months, he can be someone else, it’s the age when boys transform. Besides, I am not called to see him again. In truth, a brief encounter.
Crucifying power of adolescent beauty. Aschenbach and Tadzio. Tatiana compares Mike to a young tree. “He is tempting because at the age when one is tempted by everything,” she tells me.
His red lips, his uneven but so white teeth, his carnivorous baby smile.
Come hither, hither, my little page!
Monday, at the Gare du Nord. There, it’s done, we’ve just put Mike on the train. Our farewells in the rain. On the way back, the photos scattered on the platform. [pp. 202-4]
The next day, 11th April, Matzneff went for two months to Tunisia, where Tatiana joined him on 25 May. Readers wishing to read about his time there should turn to Matzneff in Tunisia, 1972-3.
17 June. I dine with Montherlant. I give him the example of Anakreon’s longevity (kept in shape by little girls and pots of honey). He shrugs his shoulders and launches at me:
“I don’t want to live to a hundred and fifteen. I want to die as soon as possible, and as quickly as possible.”
He tells me that before the war, for love (with young boys), it was sometimes easier in Paris than in North Africa.
We talk about women. I tell him that they are better than us; that we, in love life, are selfish and cowardly. He opines:
“I am very selfish.”
We talk about suicide again. Cyanide? Revolver? [p. 212]
17 July. Early in the morning, long talk with the Metropolitan Anthony who is passing through Paris. We see each other too rarely. I tell him about the feeling of proximity to decrepitude and death that I had in Cochin during my nephritic crises, I tell him about my book project on Father Pierre Struve, and also about Mike, but he knew about that: as soon as he returned to England, Mike told him about Tatiana and me with enthusiasm.
Mike! Last night, when I came back from Nemours, I heard that Mike would be in Paris in a few days and my heart started to beat wildly. This news frightens me. If he’s as beautiful as he was at Easter, I’ll start suffering again and I don’t like that.
I was probably wrong, but I didn’t tell Vladyka that Tatiana and I were troubled by Mike. What’s the point, since nothing will happen? […]
Wednesday evening. After prowling around L. Street for two days, I decided to go up to Paul X’s place.
Mike is there, as beautiful and tender as ever - and his unspeakable smile.[6] Sweetness and heartbreak.
Thursday morning, at the hermitage. Unable to confess to Father Serge, to take communion. Who can understand me?
Tatiana laughs at me gently. She says I’m crystallising. It’s true, but how to do otherwise? Like Aschenbach, I surrender to my fate.
At Henri Fabre-Luce’s. Softness and tension. But what did Henri and his friends think of our curious trio?
All this is charming but ambiguous. In a novel, it would end in bed.
Sunday night. Mike and I talk about love and faith. He asks me questions, wants me to enlighten him about the liturgy, about the teachings of Christ.
Monday. Whether something happens between Tatiana, Mike and me, or whether nothing happens, nothing but unhappiness can come of this adventure.
25 July. At the swimming-pool, with Mike and Tatiana. Daniel Palas is there, and René Borle.
Mike talks about “aunts” with great contempt, but he talks about them too much. “I've never been in love with a man,” he tells me. Five minutes later, he puts his arm around my neck, holds me close, compliments me on my beauty and recites to me, in his funny and delightful accent, a passage from The Arab Notebook[7] that he knows by heart.
Thursday 27th. With Tatiana, Mike and one of his comrades on the big boulevards. We run into Montherlant.
28 July. While I was at the Nouvelles littéraires with René Minguet, who talked to me about the values that the Christian West must defend, Tatiana and Mike, in the Luxembourg, on a bench near the Medici fountain... Tatiana tells me the news when I return to the Struve home. She beams. And me? I’m moved, overwhelmed. I wanted this, and without my active complicity, nothing would have happened. But let’s wait for the rest.
Sunday 30. Solovieff’s disciple Tatiana, the oblative wife, no longer exists, and me, I have the distinct sensation of playing the sorcerer’s apprentice, of being that character in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, that ‘curious extravagant’ who, to test his wife’s constancy, throws her into the arms of his best friend and thus becomes the architect of his own misfortune.
The evening. Tenderness and whisky. “To the three of us!” cries Mike as he drains his glass.
31 July. I am almost certain that Tatiana will not play along; that she will not know how to be the accomplice that Julie would have been. And without complicity, we are heading for catastrophe. [...]
August 1st. This evening I take Tatiana and Mike to dinner at Daniel Palas’s. Always the strange trio. Today Mike accompanied me to the Maison de la Radio, to Combat. I explained to him at length that I would never accept being treated by Tatiana as an enemy, as a rival who should be kept away.
“Don’t you see that she is trying to keep you away from me, to separate us?”
“Yes, but she won’t succeed, because I love you very much.”
That “very much” on the pretty lips of an English schoolboy, what a delight!
Tatiana joined us at the Trocadéro. Immediately, the atmosphere was tense. Tatiana’s hard, almost hateful looks. She can’t stand my intimacy with Mike. I’m ready to play the game of Trinitarian complicity, but not her. What she wants is Mike for herself, without me.
Poor Mike, poor Gabriel! They don’t know where they stand anymore. Only Tatiana, the traitress, knows what she wants.
On the esplanade, sipping honeyed milk, I told Tatiana for the first time that perhaps it would be best if we divorced, because I wanted to be treated as a lover whom one loves and not as a “husband” whom one betrays.
Wednesday. So it’s all my fault, it’s me who tempted the devil, but that doesn’t justify Tatiana’s unbelievably ugly, petty-bourgeois behaviour towards me. A cruel disappointment that I will never forgive her.
It is out of the question that in September we should resume our former life, under the icon of our marriage and the photo of Mgr Antoine.
Saturday. All three of us lying on the bed, Mike in my bathrobe, me in the light embroidered cassock I bought in Aleppo, Tatiana between us. Music, incense. Happiness and fulfilment. Tears of emotion, of joy.
We make plans: Christmas in Venice, Easter in Egypt or Syria...
"We are a real trio", Mike murmurs.
In his soft, fresh voice, he records poems by Byron and Keats on the tape recorder.
6 August. Mike plays it straight; so do I. Tatiana is less sure. I sense something tense and devious in her behaviour which doesn’t please me. Could it be that the cliché about women’s duplicity is true? For me, who placed Tatiana so high, who had such total confidence in her, the disillusionment would be extreme.
Friday 11. We had believed that our common love for Mike would bring us together; now we know that it is not so, that it was only a trick of the devil to break our nuptial crowns... Just now I was on the terrace, and she was sitting on the other side of the window. Her face appeared ghostly to me, blending with the sky and the clouds reflected in the double glazing, so unreal, so distant...
Our marriage is ruined. Tatiana was for me what the Sistine Madonna is in Dostoyevsky’s novels: an ideal, absolute figure. Today I can love her, desire her, but it will never be like before.
We join Mike at the Struves’. We help him pack his bags. “I love you and write to me”, he tells me.
Saturday 12 August. I am the age at which Byron died. I too should step aside: it would simplify everything.
Mike leaves. Rain and sunshine. A lot of complicity, tenderness. His “I love you” in Russian, Ia Vass lioubliou, final.
Tatiana and I spend a rather sweet day. We make love on the same bed where... [...]
Everything conspires to make me anxious: Tatiana, the money I spent in handfuls during Mike’s stay and which will be lacking in September, the forthcoming release of my book, Julie arriving from London. I’m unnerved and rather unhappy.
Monday 14 August, morning. In this story, there is only one character in me who is a winner, and that is the novelist. The husband and the Christian have lost the game. Tatiana, of whom I had formed such a noble image, is only a false icon.
A false and broken icon.
For me, Tatiana was the union of divine and human love, Christ, the Church. This ideal figure is replaced by the hopelessly ordinary one of... Cosi fan tutte.
Thursday 17. Mike’s impromptu return to Paris. His friend John slept in the corridor; Tatiana, Mike and I in the bed. John probably didn’t sleep much. Neither did we.
What amazes me most is the quiet cynicism with which Tatiana accepts the situation. She, the young Christian wife, so pure, so honest! I thought she was infinitely better than me, and she is worse.
Saturday 19 August. Yesterday evening I announced to Tatiana my decision to ask for a divorce. So she went to sleep at her friend M.’s [...].
I write to Mike’s uncle, Count Paul X.:
“I thank you for your gift which the Struves have passed on to me. Byron is in effect one of the authors of the past with whom I feel the most affinity: I probably do not have his qualities, but we certainly have the same defects.
“Mike is an extremely likeable child, and I like him very much. When I was sixteen, the adult life that opened itself before me appeared to me like an ominous and hostile universe. I think this is the case for a certain category of adolescents to which, it seems to me, Mike belongs. I’ve tried to be with him the older man I would have liked to meet when I was his age. I’m not sure I succeeded.
[...]
Tuesday 29 [August]. Still no news from Mike. […]
30 August. I wake up at 5 a.m., drenched in sweat, from a rather violent and awful nightmare: Tatiana was to go to Greece alone to a youth camp and, hostile to this departure, I was boxing Mike, who had intervened on her behalf. This was my second dream n a few days about our summer adventure.
If she could, Tatiana would have excluded me from this love. She has angrily tolerated my presence, but what she has in mind for the future is one-to-one with Mike, I would bet my hand on it. [...]
I think of Mike, bare-chested, at home, demonstrating to me the parade step of the English to the sound of the record I gave him of the military marches of imperial Russia. He raised his knees very high, both amused and very serious. Yes, it is this touching image that I retain of him, more than others, erotic and troubling. [...]
Pleasant dinner at Chrysostome’s. […] He said to me about Mike: “It’s not necessary to look beyond a fleeting and perfect moment. If you don’t see this boy again, you will leave him with an unforgettable memory.” [...]
Saturday 2 September. [...] Midnight. On my return from the swimming pool, a long conversation (from 6 p.m. to about 9 p.m.) with Tatiana. Her metallic voice, her icy gaze, - the hardness and fixity of her eyes accentuated by the make-up of a clown. Her bewildered look when she asked me, “Where are Mike’s sheets?” (i.e. the sheets we slept on with Mike), and furious when I replied, “At the laundry.”
There was a tender moment when I put my head on her lap and she gently stroked it and said, “How childish you are! How vulnerable you are!” Yes, it is true, she is stronger, more solid than me. This solidity, this strength strikes all my friends, even those who, like Daniel Palas, have only seen her twice in their lives. But so far she has used this strength, this solidity, to support our love. If she now uses it against me, I am lost. I mean I am lost if I don’t have the liberating jolt which will make me leave her.
Tatiana told me that last year she was "very much in love" with her friend M.
When she talks about Mike, she never mentions our relationship with him, only hers, as if I didn’t exist, as if what we’ve been going through these past weeks wasn’t my doing.
“My doing!” What doing? That of a blind, senseless nihilist, capable of the worst extremes, especially when they are directed against himself.
Tatiana. Her mean and stubborn look when I explain to her that the most important thing is to save our love, our marriage. What frightens me is the indifference with which Tatiana seems to contemplate the collapse of everything that was the basis of our life together: the teaching of Mgr Antoine, the sacrament we received in January 1970 in London, Orthodoxy. Is she really so different from what I thought she was?
This marriage which I accepted only for the Church, within the framework of the Church’s illusion...
[...]
Monday 4. […] Well, she doesn’t write anything and waits for the rest, but when, taking advantage of the fact that she is locked up with her two friends, I dip my hand into her bag and leaf through her notebook, I read (diagonally) pages and pages about Mike that are from a woman madly in love. The last sentence is: “I've got to get away.” I don't like Tatiana reading my notebooks, but I must admit that the method is good. At least I know where I stand.
Tuesday, 5 September. When she tells me: “I’m waiting for the next step”, it's all clear and ambiguous. Is she waiting for clarity in herself or is she waiting, more banally, for news of Mike? (Noted on the bus to my lunch with Princess Schakovskoy.) [...]
Thursday 7 [...] 7.30 pm. I leave studio 109 where Jean-François Noël has interviewed me. Twilight. Sadness and anguish. While Mike was in Paris, Tatiana kept telling me that this adventure could only bring us closer to each other. To say the least...
Friday 8. At the swimming pool Laurent, thirteen or fourteen years old. I had noticed him several days ago, for his grace, his beauty. A charming smile. [...]
At half past midnight, Tatiana comes back from M’s. While she’s in the bathroom, I don’t resist the urge to look at her notebook. There I read a draft of a letter to Mike from Monday the 4th. “Did you get my letter? Did you understand it? You and I are not the kind of people who need words to express ourselves.” This courtesy is, I suppose, for my use. A letter burning with love in which I am only mentioned to be denied, put aside. [pp. 215-30]
Thursday 21, morning. Yesterday I sent Mike a very brief note, an express one, announcing my arrival in H. on Saturday afternoon.
9:15. I go through my mail. A letter from Mike!
[...]
22 September, 5am. My back hurts, chained up, my heart is full of anguish. The more I think about it, the more I realise that between Tatiana, Mike and me everything would have been possible if it hadn’t been for her imbecilic pettiness. If, instead of rejecting and betraying me, she had played the game of complicity and loyalty, the three of us could have been very happy, in Venice and elsewhere.
For a long time I idealised my wife, but today her mediocrity is on full display. She is not Nadezhda Mandelstam[8]; she is only a small format. [...]
Yesterday morning a very fine letter from Mike, and in the 5 o’clock post another letter: he will come to pick me up at H. station but will be a bit late as he has a rugby match. [pp. 234-7]
The next day, 23 September, Matzneff flew to England to visit Mike. While waiting for his flight, he heard the news of Montherlant's suicide.
6.40 p.m., on the train taking me from H. to Victoria Station. Mike is as beautiful and fresh as ever, and his schoolboy uniform and short hair round his face accentuate this impression of childhood. He’s sixteen but one wouldn’t think he was more than fourteen. Our walk in the park. He confirms what I suspected: it’s not him, it’s Tatiana who organised the war against me, the lies. “Me, I always wanted our trio, but it’s she who broke the circle.” Nice words from a boy of his age, and, moreover. one who doesn’t speak French fluently.
That said, Tatiana’s undermining has had its effect. Mike is less affectionate with me than he was this summer in Paris, colder. Now he judges me.
[...] The melancholy sweetness of this afternoon. The lovely Sussex. The wait at the station. Mike’s entrance, red, out of breath, the tails of his black frock coat (?) flying in the wind, his fine blond hair, really like silk, flitting around his round face... [...]
Sunday 24 [...] Another afternoon at H. The fields, the cows. Mike, much more confident, relaxed, friendly and tender than yesterday. He laughs and tells me that his friend Martin, who saw me in the park, thinks I am eighteen!
“I won’t be coming to France at Christmas, but if I come at Easter, can I stay with you?”
He will write to Tatiana that he does not want her to treat me as she does, and will then write to me what she has replied. [pp. 238-9]
Thursday 28. Father Pierre Nivière tells me: “Literature is like the diaconate: one can get married before, but not after. The rivals of both sexes whom Tatiana hated were neither the girls nor the boys you slept with, it was your books. She never understood that she was the wife of an artist, of a creator. What she tells you about your infidelities that would have killed the passion in her is a joke, it’s to ease her conscience.” [...]
Saturday 30. [...] I enter the Luxembourg, walk along the Medici fountain. It’s horrible. I suffer too much. I can’t stand it any longer. Just as Tatiana wrote in her notebook: “Mike, Mike, Mike”, so I write in mine: Tatiana, Tatiana, Tatiana... […]
5 October. Pierre Sipriot,[9] with whom I dine, and very well at the Pharamond, […]
We talk of Montherlant, the risks he took when he flirted on the main boulevards. [pp. 240-3]
Thursday 19. I have lunch with the François Mitterrand[10] family. Simplicity and charm of this family meal.
“When Henri Fabre-Luce finds out the name of the magistrate who is handling your case, let him telephone me,” says Mitterrand.
A former Minister of Justice, he has retained friendships at the Palace and may be able to speed up the procedure. The judges are indeed overloaded with divorce applications, and it could take a long time.
After I had told him what was happening to me, Mitterrand told me about one of his friends who, following a similar crisis, had become a lesbian (in the Vaucluse). I am extremely disturbed that François Mitterrand (although I only spoke to him about Mike, and I did not breathe a word about Tatiana’s lesbian “friends”) immediately made this connection. Prescient?
So we talk about divorce, but also war, literature and suicide. Mitterrand tells me that there are more than ten false first editions of Les Liaisons dangereuses.[11] About Montherlant, he tells me:
“I’ve been thinking about you. I know how sad you are. I’m sad too. Montherlant, Drieu La Rochelle, all the masters of my youth are now dead!
I suggest that he make me his Minister of Cults when he becomes President of the Republic. [p. 251]
Friday 27 [October], the morning. I regret that Natacha wasn’t able to come to this congress of orthodox youth, for the confusion is such that we would easily have been able to slip away to my bedroom without anyone noticing.
It’s 9:10. The English delegation is announced for soon. Will Mike be part of it? I wish to be spared this torment. From the moment when the T.E.E. tore me away from Paris, I am resurrected. I’ve only been in Belgium for a few days and already I’m regaining taste for life, the nightmarish summer of 1972 is slipping away. I absolutely do not want the sight of Mike to take me back there. My only chance of salvation is to expel Tatiana and Mike from my thoughts, my mind, my heart forever.
How old is she? Sixteen? Seventeen? With her flowing blonde hair cascading over her red jumper, her light eyes, her white skin with a small blue vein snaking above her left eyebrow, her fine features, the delicate hem of her lips, her well-defined chin, Nadejda Selezneff reminds me intensely of Pierrette, my divine fourteen year old from the summer of 1962 in Venice; she also resembles the young boy who plays the role of Tadzio in Visconti’s film. She has the age, the grace, the haughty reserve of Thomas Mann’s character, in which indifference and shyness are combined, and the same smell of death rises from the gloomy canals of Bruges along which we are walking as from the waters of Venice.
Her grave and gentle face is that of one of those Memling virgins we admired together at St. John’s Hospital. It is such a face, and not the proof of Saint Anselm, that could make me believe in the existence of God.
Nadejda. Yes, that’s right, Tadzio, with his distant, airy way of passing by me without seeing me. […]
Saturday 28th. [...] Mike hasn’t come. That's much better. If he had been there, it would have been unbearable very quickly.
[...]
30 October. […] Telephoned Henri Fabre-Luce who announced to me the date of the conciliation before the judge: Tuesday 21 November. I consult the calendar and see that according to the old style this will be Mike’s birthday. What a symbol! […]
2 November. […] I lunch with Father Jean Lambrino.[12] “It was madness,” he tells me (about Mike). This Jesuit is very strong, but his vocabulary is more Freudian than Christian.
[…]
14 November. […] Tania Struve tells me that Paul X. (Mike’s uncle) received an anonymous letter concerning me. I suppose I’m accused in it of having debauched his nephew. I don’t care.
[…]
Monday 27 [November]. Very awkward meeting with Count Paul X. He does not show me the letter he claims to have received, but whether it is an anonymous letter or the “Arab telephone” of our dear Russian-Orthodox milieu, he is aware of what happened this summer. I looked sheepish and turned my nose down. What else could he do? [...]
30 November. [...] This morning, the director of the programme “A book, voices”, Mr. Gravier, at my place. Interview about We’ll no longer go to the Luxembourg.[13] It’s mad, this reality that joins fiction, this pretty English schoolboy of fifteen, sixteen years, called Mike... [...]
Despite the postal strike, I’ve just received an extremely loving letter from Julie. She gives me the dates of Mike’s school holidays and seems delighted at the possibility of a complicity... But I think it’s too late. Assuming I arrive in London on the 15th, will Mike be there? The time to introduce him to Julie was in September, and I was wrong (always my absurd “delicacy”) to refuse myself.
On a friend’s remark about her feelings after her own break-up:
It’s well observed, well said, and that’s why there’s no question of me kissing Tatiana on both cheeks one day. On her return from the Plateau d’Assy (the M.'s offered her a return ticket), Tatiana phoned me at length to tell me that we shouldn’t dispute over Mike, like divorcing parents disputing over a child, that one day perhaps we could rent a flat together, in short, that we should remain, as O. would say, “good friends”. All these accommodations horrify me.
[...]
I won’t go to England because I don’t really want to see Mike again. I want to forget him, to forget Tatiana, to distance myself. I’ve been thinking about this for almost five months, tormenting myself because of it. Stop this! Long live Lapassade,[14] the South, carefree living, pleasure! […]
11 [December ...] The worst is always certain, as Béchu would say. Vladyka has done nothing of what he promised to do. He has been back in London for weeks, months, and he hasn’t even seen Mike! And this man is Tatiana’s spiritual father! He is mine! A spiritual father, a doukhovni otietz? You’ve got to be kidding. He’s just an ectoplasm, an absentee, who doesn’t care what happens to us and hasn’t done anything to try to pick up the pieces. Horrible, horrible disappointment.
12 December [...]. 11 am. Adorable letter from Julie in which she speaks to me of Mike with an intelligence and delicacy that touch me to the core. [...]
13 December. [...] Tatiana, at the Lazy Place. For the first time since July, her mask cracks. Her cries, like the time when she murmured to me: “I am very small.” Her head against my shoulder, huddled against me, she cries. I kiss her hair, her mouth. I hold her hands tightly in mine. However, I am not fooled: it is not about our dead love that she sheds tears, but about her current situation: the need to find work, a home; and above all Mike, who is obviously distancing himself.
Mike is distancing himself from Tatiana, and so am I. Of course, I can still feel pain because of her, but I have the feeling that the worst is over. I note this after a tender evening with the beautiful and peaceful Pia. [...]
Friday 15 [...] From 7 to 7.40 p.m. in the office of the Metropolitan Antoine, Péclet Street. Painful conversation, the main interest of which is to allow me to verify Tatiana’s power of dissimulation, her aptitude for lying, her organised, systematic desire to hide from me everything about Mike that she knows and thinks I don’t know, to act without and against me. It’s infantile and repugnant, and nevertheless the hatred I’ve felt these last months for my “wife” is giving way bit by bit to other feelings: pity, concern. [pp. 255-78]
1973
From 6 to 24 January, Matzneff was in Tunisia. Readers wishing to read about his time there should turn to Matzneff in Tunisia, 1972-3.
24 February. Long interview with Mgr. Antoine. Two pieces of news:
1° Mike is in plaster, from the neck to the pelvis (decalcification of the spine).
2° It’s been over for months for Mike and Tatiana. Even before Christmas, Mike told Metropolitan Antoine that his feelings for Tatiana and me were friendship, and that he no longer wanted the sexual liaison that Tatiana wished to maintain.
Tania Struve had predicted that Mike, who loves and admires me very much, would not accept for long to take part in an action directed against me, and that he would very fast leave Tatiana. I didn’t want to believe her. But she was right. The one whom I had accused (in October or November) in a rather nasty letter of being a bloody traitor, pulled himself together, God be praised. [...]
Wednesday, 27 February. […] She, tender, talking about Mike in the past tense, with the same innocent face as in September, when she told me her pretty little lies.
She knew that I had seen Mgr. Antoine, that I knew about Mike: hence, surely, this sudden desire to talk to me. I was friendly and attentive, but convinced that she was putting on an act with me. Lying has become second nature to her. I could never trust her again. If she’d been the one to break up with me, it would have been different; but since she’s only doing this charm act because Mike dumped her and she’s panicking at the idea of having lost out on everything, she’s not believable. [...]
2 March. [...] Not only did Tatiana not tell me that Mike had dumped her, but she left me to understand that it was she who... Lies, always lies. She’s no better or worse an actress than last summer, but this time I see her game clearly and I won’t be fooled, even for a moment.
Saturday 3 March. Afternoon spent on my bed. Pia wanted to come, but I have to stay alone, waiting for Henri Fabre-Luce’s call. Stagnation.
18 h. Henri’s call. The judgement has been given in the way we wished. Here I am single again, here I am free! I write at once to Mike:
“My dear Mike, there, it’s all over. The judge pronounced our divorce this afternoon, Saturday, March 3, 1973 A.D. You see, I took the advice you gave me in your letter of October 11: It’s no use crying over spilt milk.” [pp. 313-5]
Saturday 17, noon. Lunching at Saint Robert’s, I take the 82 to the Luxembourg. At the stop opposite the Lycée Montaigne, a troop of girls and boys fills the bus. A girl of fourteen or fifteen year and a boy of twelve sit next to me in the back bench, she on my right and he on my left. They have blue eyes, fair complexions and long blond hair. They are very beautiful. I always thought that one guardian angel was not enough for me, that I needed at least two, and of different sexes, to reconcile the Byzantine doctors. Between such heavenly creatures, nothing unfortunate can happen to me.
Depending on the stations, the children get off the bus, or get on it, like precious stones that are taken out of a jewel box and put back in. At Saint-François-Xavier, the daughters of Victor-Duruy all have a cavalry general as a father, so I mentally stand at attention. Avenue Kléber, 82 is taken by storm by the pupils of the Institut de l'Assomption, but - is it because of their strict blue uniforms or because of the superiority of the secular school over the free school and of paganism over Christianity? - I find them less pretty than my secondary school girls in the Luxembourg Garden.
The sun is shining, the air is fragrant. There is happiness on earth. The fruit is just waiting to be picked: all one has to do is dare to reach out. And to think that there are poor types who don’t like public transport. Ah, “transport”, what a divine word!
In the evening, at home, I open Littré, and I read: “Canst thou conceive the transports of the happy Hermione?” (Racine), “I give myself up blindly to the transport which carries me along” (Racine), “Taste in full transport this bright happiness” (Molière), so many quotations which prove abundantly that since the XVIIth century, our best authors have taken happiness and bus 82 almost as synonymous terms. [pp. 320-1]
For exactly a month from 28 April, Matzneff was in Tunisia. Readers wishing to read about his time there should turn to Matzneff in Tunisia, 1972-3.
Saturday 7 [July]. In the Luxembourg, with Tatiana. It has been raining. The air is neither cold nor hot, just right. She tells me about her father’s suicide, which she experienced as a betrayal; she makes a few confessions about last summer which confirm what I had sensed: her fierce desire to keep Mike away from me, to have him to herself. Me, upset by these “revelations” which are not really such, but which nevertheless hurt me to the core. This time, I am determined to ask for a religious divorce. [p. 350]
Sunday 29. Neil, a very pretty American of sixteen who on the platform of les Grands-Augustins asked me for directions. It was love at first sight. In the evening, I take him to dinner at Pia’s. Pia’s slightly questioning smile. What does she think?
Monday 30. Mad happiness which redeems the misfortunes of last year (yes, a year ago, to the day). He is a new Mike, wonderfully beautiful and genial. His body offered, so white, so soft. His ardent kisses. He wants to be a pianist and talks to me at length about Bach, “the last Baroque”, and about Janis Joplin, a “fantastic” singer he wants me to discover.
In the evening, at Danièle’s, she is enthusiastic about the kid. “Live this meeting intensely”, she tells me. If Neil didn’t have to leave in two days for the United States, it’s clear that we would live, Danièle, he and I, what Tatiana didn’t want us to live last year with Mike.
4 August. It is drunk with the happiness of all kinds experienced with the blond child that I left for Normandy, for Thierry Garcin’s home. [pp. 352-3]
Saturday 18 [August]. At the swimming-pool, Pierre H., my little friend of ten, returns to Strasbourg. He had taken a real liking to me (his mother says). He didn’t leave me, and the staff at Deligny[15] think he’s my son. I loved his bright, petulant look, full of tenderness and malice. After his departure, I flirt with a pretty girl (with nice breasts), Marie-Claude. [pp. 355-6]
A week earlier, Matzneff had met 15-year-old Francesca, and within another week he had begun with her one of the most passionate love affairs of his life. There is no further mention of boys in the remaining months covered by this volume.
[1] Frédéric Mitterand (1947-2024), then a 22-year-old teacher, was a nephew of the future President François Mitterrand, already an eminent socialist politician and a friend to Matzneff. The younger Mitterrand had, aged 12, starred in a film, Fortunat. A few months after becoming Minister of Culture in June 2009, he came under fierce attack for having written in his best-selling autobiographical novel, La mauvaise vie (The Bad Life), published in 2005, of his “delight” visiting male brothels in Bangkok, where “I got into the habit of paying for boys ... The profusion of young, very attractive and immediately available boys put me in a state of desire I no longer needed to restrain or hide.” Understandably, Mitterrand defended himself against the attacks by claiming that he had meant “boys” only loosely and they had really been mature men only slightly younger than himself.
[2] The Russian Orthodox priest Father Pierre Struve (1925-68), his wife Tatiana (“Tania”) and their four children were old friends of Matzneff with whom he dined regularly. Like him, they were of White Russian descent. Through them, he got to know many he became close to, including his mistress and future wife Tatiana. The Struve couple feature quite prominently in Matzneff’s novel, Isaïe réjouis-toi (Isaiah rejoice), where they are called Nicolas and Matouchka de Rouschitz.
[3] Roger Peyrefitte (1907-2000) was the author of the prize-winning Special Friendships (1943) and the pre-eminent boysexual writer of his generation. This is Matzneff’s first unambiguous mention of an encounter with Peyrefitte, who wrote him a “charming letter” the next January, and with whom he then developed a long friendship. There had, however, been an enigmatic reference to him in Matzneff’s journal entry of 26 June 1960, where Peyrefitte was said to be sitting in a bus opposite to “a pretty little scout” whom Matzneff was sitting next to.
[4] Henry de Montherlant (1895-1972), an eminent author and boysexual, whose writings include the play La Ville dont le prince est un enfant (1952) and the novel Les Garçons (The Boys), published in 1969. Matzneff had first met him in June 1957 and their stormy but important friendship continued until Montherlant’s suicide. Peyrefitte was a much older friend of Montherlant’s, but was also sometimes alienated from him. In 1953, another friend of Peyrefitte, the boysexual artist Gaston Goor had collaborated with him to illustrate beautifully a new edition of his masterpiece Special Friendships, in which the chief villain bore a striking facial resemblance to Montherlant.
[5] Gilles C. was a Parisian boy whom Matzneff met in October 1962 and had an affair that continued at least over the years 1963-4, described in The Archangel with Cloven Hooves, 1963-4.
[6] Mike was staying in the home of Count Paul X., who, as becomes clear from later mentions, was his uncle. Assuming the account in Matzneff’s novel Isaïe réjouis-toi (Isaiah rejoice) is true, Paul X. was, like Matzneff himself, an Orthodox Parisian of Russian descent (hence why Matzneff had met Mike at the Struves’), and he was the brother of Mike’s mother (who lived in London after marrying and divorcing an Englishman). Paul X. is called Pierre Derjavine in the novel.
[7] Le Carnet arabe (The Arab Notebook) was a story by Matzneff published the previous year.
[8] Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) was a Russian liberal and author of important books about Stalinist repression.
[9] Pierre Sipriot (1921-98) was a journalist and the principal biographer of Montherlant, about whom he wrote many books.
[10] François Mitterrand (1916-96) was then leader of the Socialist Party, the main opposition to the government. He had warmly befriended Matzneff as a promising young writer in October 1965, just before his first attempt to be elected President. It sounds from what Mitterrand said at the lunch here described about knowing of Matzneff’s closeness to the boysexual Montherlant, as though Mitterrand already knew, by this stage of Matzneff’s attraction to boys. Matzneff telling him about Mike makes this even more probable. In any case, they were to remain friends after Matzneff let the whole world know of his sexuality by publishing Isaïe réjouis-toi and Les Moins de seize ans in 1974, and even after Mitterrand became President in 1981, a striking testimony both to the freedom of speech and association that then prevailed (compared with later) and to Mitterrand’s personal integrity.
[11] Les Liaisons dangereuses was an epistolary novel by Pierre Pierre Choderlos de Laclos published in 1782.
[12] Jean Lambrino (1923-2012) was a leading French poet and a Jesuit.
[13] Nous n’irons plus au Luxembourg (We’ll no longer go to the Luxembourg) was Matzneff’s new novel.
[14] Matzneff had spent carefree days chasing boys in Tunisia in 1966 in the company of his friend the sociologist Georges Lapassade (1924-2008), who preferred black men, as recounted in Matzneff in Tunisia, 1966.
[15] Deligny was a floating swimming-pool on the Seine in Paris frequented by Matzneff and where he often got to know girls and boys, leading to liaisons.