Vanessa Springora was fourteen when the distinguished writer Gabriel Matzneff took her as his mistress. Decades later, she has published “Consent,” a memoir about his “triple predation—sexual, literary, and psychic.”

Gabriel Matzneff was there waiting almost every afternoon when Vanessa Springora got out of school. In winter, he wore a gold-buttoned greatcoat; in springtime, a belted safari jacket. Sunglasses in all weather. He was a famous writer, with a letter in his wallet from the President to prove it. She was a middle schooler, his girlfriend. In 1986, he was about to turn fifty. She was fourteen. Perhaps the costumes provided a furtive thrill, for their affair was a flagrantly open act that no adult in his or her world saw fit to disrupt. Her mother had him over for dinner. Her teachers asked no questions. The police pursued no charges when they got an anonymous tip about the relationship. Matzneff’s publishers paid for books in which he contemplated his attraction to what he called the “third sex” of “extreme youth, the age between ten and sixteen.” Meanwhile, a doctor to whom Springora confided her fear of penetration (Matzneff had, until this point, sodomized her) while recovering from a strep infection at a hospital known for treating children cut her hymen so that she could “discover the joy of sex.”

Vanessa Springora
Vanessa SpringoraIllustration by João Fazenda

Last year, Springora published “Le Consentement” (“Consent”), a memoir of what she has called her “triple predation—sexual, literary, and psychic.” She wrote it as a “message in a bottle,” she said recently, speaking on Zoom from her apartment in Paris, but it landed like a tidal wave, sweeping away the rationalizations and vanities in which sexual abusers in France had taken shelter for years. “Le Consentement” has sold some two hundred thousand copies and will be translated into twenty-three languages. According to the sociologist Pierre Verdrager, the book’s success marks “a major turning point” in the perception of pedophilia in France. “merci, vanessa springora,” read a sign that the feminist collective Les Colleuses pasted on a wall in Paris last year.

“Sexual abuse, and especially that of minors, is sadly universal, but what’s particular to France in this story is the impunity, the silence that was imposed, not to protect a family or an institution but, rather, a literary figure who was placed at the top of the cultural pyramid,” Springora said. Prosecutors opened an investigation into Matzneff’s abuse of Springora and other children, and he will stand trial in September on separate charges. At eighty-four, he has continued to defend his “lasting and magnificent love affair” with Springora, whom he tormented well into her adulthood, publishing her adolescent correspondence and harassing her at work. But the state has finally stripped him of a lucrative subsidy for aging artists, by which he had collected more than a hundred and sixty thousand euros since 2002. “I think that my book arrived at the right moment,” Springora said, e-cigarette in hand. “Five years ago, it probably would have been buried.”

Springora met Matzneff at a dinner party that she attended with her mother. As cheese was being served, he turned his attention to Springora, who was sitting in a corner, bored, reading Balzac’s “Eugénie Grandet.” Later, her mother drove him home. “He had his arm against mine, his eyes on me, and the predatory smile of a large golden wildcat,” Springora writes. Then the letters started arriving, composed in turquoise ink. When she began her manuscript, Springora, who runs the French publishing house Julliard, worried that her story might seem like a “completely outdated” period piece: soixante-huitard parents, latchkey afternoons, a lax post-sexual-revolution intellectual milieu. (The only rule: “It is forbidden to forbid.”) An insomniac, she wrote late at night, jotting fragments in a notebook by her bed. “I wanted to leave a trace in literary history,” she said. “It was a very ambitious project, but the idea was to be able to leave—facing his own body of work—another book that would sing a different tune.”

The social impact of “Le Consentement” has somewhat overshadowed the book’s literary achievement, but one of the belated truths that emerges from its pages is that Springora is a writer. She wanted to be one, of course. But she fell out of love with words after Matzneff took over a homework assignment that she was doing one afternoon, reinventing her as a champion equestrian, although she’d been on a horse just once. “And so the dispossession began,” she writes. It’s crushing to think of the decades Springora lost, the books she didn’t write, while Matzneff racked up prizes, stealing her vitality and pawning it off as his genius. For years, she avoided books, recognizing “the toxic load they can contain.” Then “the solution finally presented itself to me,” she writes. “Why not ensnare the hunter in his own trap, ambush him within the pages of a book?” Her sentences gleam like metal; each chapter snaps shut with the clean brutality of a latch. The better she writes, the freer she is. ♦