Readers who enjoyed The Sexual Life of Catherine M (a scandalous and bestselling memoir of one woman’s buccaneering sexual appetites) and were looking forward to more of the same might feel shortchanged by the follow-up. There are one or two moments of graphic anatomical detail in Jealousy, but overwhelmingly this is a book about emotions, not erections.

Indeed, the first few chapters of Jealousy might even be termed dull. Millet has the wordy style of the French intellectual, which can appear pretentious. But while there are a few passages worthy of Pseuds Corner, once the book gets under way this volume of self-psychoanalysis (essentially what this is) begins to fascinate.

While Millet’s earlier account focused on her own sexual activity, here the obsession is with the erotic adventures of her long-term partner Jacques. These she discovers by rifling through his private papers (I say private: he had not concealed them from her). As his world of seduction unfolds, she becomes ever more engrossed. “I was aware that my inquisitorial determination was bordering on addiction,” she writes. “Before long, the little pieces of paper found by chance were not enough, I would go and look through his pockets for more. I committed two or three acts of petty theft.” As the picture evolves, Millet’s anguish grows like Japanese knotweed: relentless, indestructible, penetrating every aspect of her sexual and emotional being.

The paradox is obvious: how can a woman who has lived a life of sexual abandon object to her partner having a little fun? How could she have been so naive as to expect that he would stand meekly by (she never concealed her behaviour) while she romped her way through the orgiastic salons of France? But there is no room for cold rationale or self-recrimination. Millet’s jealousy and sense of betrayal is so elemental, so violent, that it is immune to reason, manifesting itself in physical crises in which she trembles uncontrollably or beats herself about the head with her own fists. The keys to this confusion lie in the book, although Millet does not always appear entirely conscious of this. There is, for example, a passage in which she talks about going to a park as a child with her family, and playing a game of boules. Somehow she misses out on a turn; nobody notices, but she does — and this benign neglect wounds her deeply. The question takes hold in the reader’s mind: how much of Millet’s apparently liberated sexual abandon is born out of a deep-seated insecurity? Is her sexual odyssey, while undoubtedly an exercise in erotic fulfilment, also part of a quest for affection, expressed (as so many insecure young women do) through sex?

Her irrational fury in the face of Jacques’s adventures would seem to indicate not just a desire to be loved, but also a crisis of identity. After all, a true libertine has no time for the hum-drum intellectual constraints of jealousy, rooted as it is in the bourgeois concept of fidelity. And Millet’s lower-middle-class roots, both a source of rebellion and nostalgia, belie her status as a celebrated art critic. This is a theme she returns to frequently, especially when recalling details of her own mother’s life, which ended in suicide.

Millet is, by her own admission, a self-schooled intellectual. This informs her two meaningful male relationships, the first with Claude (with whom she launched her art magazine) and the second with Jacques. Both men have a Pygmalion element to them. In particular, Jacques acts as the fixed point in her life around which her freedom revolves. “If anyone had asked me, I would have said that my one link with the real world was the bond I had made long ago with Jacques,” she writes. To discover that he had been quietly tending to his own desires shakes her to the core, undermining this all-important source of intellectual and emotional security.

Sexually, this produces some uncomfortable emotions. She finds that her onanistic fantasies take on a rather nasty masochistic tinge, in which her humiliation in the face of another woman becomes key to her arousal. She now derives pleasure from her own suffering, which might have led to a gloomy sexual cul-de-sac. In fact, there is a surprisingly happy ending, since Jacques, while finding many of her antics exasperating, clearly also has a thing for jealous women.

It’s rather sweet, really. She cries, they talk a lot; he sends her erotic postcards; she responds like a smitten schoolgirl, overcome by emotion. “Our bodies were refreshed by [his] tender pornographic messages ... I watched out for them in the post and read and reread them with deep pleasure.” Granted, it’s all a little bit hysterical; but it’s also rather romantic.

The requirement of a successful sequel is not to simply rehash the first but to move on, both artistically and intellectually. Here Millet — writer, art critic, sexual libertine and one crazy, mixed-up lady — has done just that.

Jealousy by Catherine Millet, trans Helen Stevenson (Serpent’s Tail, £10.99; Buy this book; 240pp)

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