When it comes to sexual conduct, we pride ourselves that we have become more tolerant and less censorious that our forefathers. We are far more open or frank about sexual matters than they were. Children, so it seems to me, are force-fed sexual knowledge from an earlier and earlier age. We don’t believe any more in an age of innocence, as existing neither in fact nor as something desirable. A school teacher once told me that one of her young pupils, aged seven had come crying to her because one of his classmates had called him a virgin.

Asked whether he knew what a virgin was, he replied, ‘I don’t know, but I know it’s something horrible.’

Despite the fact that we pride ourselves on our enlightened, relaxed and liberal attitude to sexuality, one cannot help but descry the working of a kind of Second Law of Thermodynamics in regard to outrage over what we deem to be sexual misconduct. What we find outrageous might have changed, but the quantity of outrage is a constant.

A school teacher once told me that one of her young pupils, aged seven had come crying to her because one of his classmates had called him a virgin. Asked whether he knew what a virgin was, he replied, ‘I don’t know, but I know it’s something horrible.’

Moral storms about sex blow up very suddenly, and not just because the facts were hitherto hidden. A good example is a recent scandal in France, which has had relatively slight coverage in the Anglophone world. It concerns a once-respected writer called Gabriel Matzneff, whose books as far as I know have not been translated into English. He has never been an enormous best-seller in France, but he is well known to the literati and, until January 2nd this year, was well-respected by them. On that date, a book titled Le Consentement (Consent) was published in which a woman called Vanessa Springora alleged that Matzneff sexually abused her as an adolescent– or perhaps I should say recounted his abuse of her, since the basic facts are not disputed by him, only the interpretation of the facts.

Matzneff is of White Russian descent, born in 1936, a cultivated and erudite man, said to be a brilliant conversationalist, and with a great deal of charm. He has published about forty books, all with the most famous publishing houses of France. He is in receipt to a small pension for writers granted by the French state, and he has also been granted a small flat by the city of Paris, because he is some kind of cultural monument. He was admired by Presidents Pompidou and Mitterand.

Matzneff is also an unapologetic and unashamed paedophile, attracted to the young of both sexes. What is remarkable is that he has never been at pains to hide or disguise this, indeed his paedophilic conquests are a theme of the many diaries that he has published. He acknowledges, for example, his trips to Manila to pay for sexual relations with ten year-old boys. In 1974, he published a book with the title of Les Moins de seize ans (Those Less than Sixteen), reprinted twice, the last time in 1994 – by strange coincidence by the publisher of which his nemesis, Vanessa Springora, is now the director. No one could accuse him hypocrisy, the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Matzneff prefers the tribute that vice pays to vice.