What on earth must it be like being married to Catherine Millet? Not much fun, I should imagine, which is weird, given that she is a nympho, and a French one at that. But if you are Jacques Henric, a poet and novelist and Madame Sex’s right-hand…well, er, right hand for the past 20 years, you are first of all the biggest cuckold in the world, and second, you are the biggest cuckold everyone knows, because seven years ago Mme Millet, an otherwise rather matronly, snail-faced Parisian art critic, shocked and awed the world with her virtuoso memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M, an unflinching account of her three decades as a sexual adventuress (or dumpster, depending how you look at it). In surprisingly glassy, ­emotionally detached prose, she related a wild stream of diverse erotic experiences, such as taking part in 150-person orgies, satisfying truck drivers in the Bois de Boulogne (now if that’s not chic I don’t know what is), even having sex with her dentist in return for a new set of teeth. The number of lovers she has had? “Incalculable.”

Only one of those lovers was her husband, Henric, whose pithiest moment arguably came soon after they met, when he observed, “Damn…I’m beginning to fall in love with a girl who sleeps with lots of people.”

But there was nothing he could do about it. Millet insisted that she be allowed to continue her avant-garde lifestyle and if he wanted to do the same, he was welcome to. Any jealousy she felt then was controlled, contained, intellectualised and remained merely “episodic”.

Until, well, she had another book to write. Now Henric is not only the most cuckolded man on the planet, he is apparently the biggest lying, cheating bastard, too. Millet admits that early on in their relationship she had felt jealous “three or four times” but had thought nothing more of it. But when she ­discovers nude photographs of a young ­art-world acolyte, “L”, among his personal effects one day, she flips. Obsessively, forensically, repeatedly, she trawls his diaries, his photographs and his notes, piecing together frissons past and present, and is horrified to discover that he has had many more affairs than she ­imagined, at least “five or six” (unlike, of course, her 500,000 or 600,000). When, finally, she ­confronts him (comically, he initially tries to dismiss the relationship with “L” as “paternal”), over dinner in a restaurant, she completely falls apart: “The grey, sham-chic décor witnessed the disintegration of the woman.”

There follow three years of what she calls “the crises”, a complete physical and mental breakdown, punctuated by seizures and tranquillisers, and only finally brought under control by a period of ­psychoanalysis.

She should have seen it coming, of course. At the start of their relationship, Henric had been vociferously opposed to her sexual appetites, writing intense, Gallic letters in which he described their arrangement as “Feydeauesque” and in which “he brought in psychoanalysis and in the end the words ‘refusal of castration’, ‘hysteria’, ‘perversion’ and Lacan quotations that left me prostrate”. Tiens! Now, he says, she doesn’t have a leg to stand on — “[Henric] pointed out my own behaviour, that I had never stopped going to orgies, and that, above all, for long ­periods I had desired other people” — a harsh reality that she tries to deal with as only she knows how, by training her ­fantasies on her husband’s infidelities, getting off on imagining him with other women, behaviour that he angrily calls “masochistic jealousy”.

Millet’s prose is still beautiful — swirling and elliptical, albeit with some slightly clunky translations: “her sex” is popular, in spite of being a phrase only an Edwardian sexologist would use. But her second offering has, of course, none of the wow factor, the bareback esprit, of the first. She describes the animal pangs of jealousy well: searching through the diaries on all fours, bashing her head against a wall (which she then spoils with a meandering comparison to Jackson Pollock and the percussive act of throwing paint on canvas). There are some extremely overwrought images: at one point, writing a letter to Henric in an “erotic fury” because she has discovered another woman is visiting him at his studio, she ­honestly describes herself as “the Eiffel Tower”. “Straddling his body, I asserted my exclusive right to this position.”

Previously, Millet was light, funny, ­mischievous. Now she is histrionic, hysterical, exhausting. She has moved from her vagina to her navel, and the view is, tragically, less interesting.

Jealousy by Catherine Millet
Serpent’s Tail £10.99 pp240

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