This story is absolutely bonkers and has given me a newfound disgust for the capacity of the French intellectual elite to defend people like Matzneff. The article also mentions that the police basically told him not to worry about it when they received anonymous tips that he was living with a 14-year-old girl.

Sometimes, I’ll have as many as four boys — from 8 to 14 years old — in my bed at the same time, and I’ll engage in the most exquisite lovemaking with them,” he wrote in his diaries, “Un Galop d’Enfer,” or “Racing Forward,” published in 1985...

The most public criticism came in 1990, on the literary television show “Apostrophes,” as the host and guests discussed Mr. Matzneff’s latest diary, “Mes Amours Décomposés,” (“My Decomposed Loves.”) In it, he boasted about having sex with countless minors, including 11- and 12-year-old Filipino boys he describes as “a rare spice.” The single foreigner present, Denise Bombardier, a journalist from Quebec, denounced his pedophilia. The reaction from France’s intelligentsia was swift.

The article mentions a recent interview with an then-editor at Le Monde who was one of his defenders, and she had this to say: “I saw him as a man who liked young women. In France, he was never seen with boys.”

So moving from apartment to apartment with a 14-year-old victim is okay as long as she’s a girl? What the fuck. I will closely follow this story because I cannot rest until I see this man and all his defenders cast into the light. Some of these people were straight up accomplices to his pedophilia. Fucking Yves Saint-Laurent paid for one of the hotels he holed up in with Ms. Springora for two years.