"The boy’s parents are both university professors. When they discover the affair, they lodge a complaint in court for corruption of a minor. Suppose that this charge is serious when it is levelled against a woman but not very serious if the accused is a man. The reason for this would be not only a long history of American jurisprudence but a prevailing belief that a Don Juan is simply exercising a normal role in society, whereas women have been troublemakers ever since Genesis...
Imagine that habeas corpus does not exist in American law but that preventive detention does: anyone can be put in prison without a trial and kept as long as the judge conducting the preliminary investigation sees fit. This judge is sovereign. He is not obliged to consult anybody or give a reason for whatever he decides. When the teacher is arrested and held without a trial, public opinion is aroused, because it is utterly unusual for someone of her class and background to be jailed. If she is being treated like the illiterate and the poor, then something must be wrong...
Given that particular climate, it was easy for someone like Gabrielle Russier, who was intellectually developed but emotionally very young, to become fatally mistaken about possibilities and consequences. The specific sexual situation of the young boy and the older woman is a repeated theme in French novels and plays. She knew it, because she taught Racine and Stendhal, Colette and Radiguet; she grew up in a society where books are revered, but she obviously knew nothing about what that same society would tolerate in practice...
Calling herself Dyana Rossa is odder still, beyond any conclusions a stranger can come to without impertinence. It is just simply not usual for a grown woman to identify herself with classical heroines or with automobiles...
The question of what people see in each other still defies analysis. The mystery of what a couple is, exactly, is almost the only true mystery still left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature—or for love, for that matter...
One can’t help noticing that everyone connected with this case was either irritable or violent. Christian broke Gabrielle’s door in; she threw a young boy’s luggage out a train window; in one of her letters Gabrielle cautions her ex-husband that it will not help her cause if he blows up at people. As for members of the legal profession, they were at the end of their patience when proceedings were barely under way. Even the Minister of Justice was to explain the case by saying, after her death, that the boy’s parents had begun the whole affair because they had lost patience too."
I don't know why but I found this article (from 1971) utterly striking; it was the writing style but also the way it completely pulls you into another society. I feel like I understand so much more about France now, but also the difference between the US and Europe. And then also the complexities of sexism.
It's LONG but engaging in a really special way.
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