Les amitiés particulières

Plot summary

The plot revolves around Georges de Sarre, a fourteen-year-old boy who is sent to a Catholic boarding school in 1920s France. Getting to know the other boys, he is immediately interested in Lucien Rouvière, of whom he is warned by the unsympathetic Marc de Blajan, who cryptically informs him that some of the students "may seem good, but are in fact not". Georges is dismayed when he learns that Lucien already has a boyfriend, André Ferron. He befriends Lucien, but filled with envy, tries to destroy their relationship, eventually succeeding in getting André expelled in a Machiavellian scheme.

When his advances towards Lucien remain fruitless, Georges starts a "special friendship", i.e. a friendship with homosexual overtones, with a twelve-year-old student, the beautiful Alexandre (Alexander) Motier. The priests who lead the school disapprove of these relationships, even though it does not go beyond a few kisses and love poems, with no sexual connotation.

Despite their air of condemnation of these special friendships, some of the priests harbour sexual feelings for the boys. One of them, Father de Trennes, likes to invite boys to join him in his room at night for a few drinks and cigarettes. Georges continues his scheming ways and gets Father de Trennes expelled by an anonymous letter. However, Father Lauzon, who is a friend of Alexandre's family and wants to protect him, learns about their relationship and demands that it be ended immediately.

Lauzon talks Georges into giving back the love letters from Alexandre, which at the time the novel is set meant that a relationship was over. In the film version this is straightforward: Georges is forced to return the letters, but Alexandre cannot see this, thinks that Georges had abandoned him, and commits suicide. The account in the novel is more complicated: Georges is aware that he could deceive the priest by handing over only a few of the letters and that Alexandre would then know that he was not ending their affair, but nevertheless he decides to return them all, in order to subject the boy to a 'test' and a 'passing crisis', and thereby lead him to abandon his wild plans of running away from home in order for the two of them to decamp together (p. 397 of the 1946 edition). What is clear is that Georges is not single-minded in his attachment to their affair in the way that Alexandre is. The shock of the boy's death, however, works a change of heart, and the novel ends with his attaining the same devotion to love that Alexandre had shown.

The work has been praised for its elegant style, and the discretion with which the subject is treated. One example is the question which Alexander poses to Georges: "Georges, do you know the things one should not know?"

Relationship to Peyrefitte's biography and other similar works

The plot is understood to be largely autobiographical, with de Sarre being Peyrefitte's alter ego in the book. As in the book, Peyrefitte had a relationship with a younger student at a Catholic boarding school and, as in the book, his love interest eventually committed suicide.

The reader can follow George de Sarre's later life as a diplomat in Greece in Peyrefitte's Les Ambassades and La Fin des ambassades, where he also meets Father de Trennes again. Again, this parallels Peyrefitte's life as a diplomat in the 1930s/1940s.

Peyrefitte was on (mostly) friendly terms with Henry de Montherlant, who in his later years wrote a novel (Les Garçons, 1969) about a similar relationship. There exists substantial correspondence between the two on, among other things, love for boys and young men.