Subsequently, they worked together at the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française and at Gallimard.
Paulhan was a towering literary figure, handsome in an imperious way, with features that most readily expressed amusement and disdain. In film footage from 1986, when she was 81, and which she stipulated was not to be shown until after her death, Aury remembers him as 'tall, broad-shouldered, somewhat heavy-set, with a Roman-like face, and something both smiling and sarcastic in his expression'.
Nearly two decades after his death, her eyes had a faraway look when she talked about him. 'Existence filled him with wonder,' she continued. 'Both the admirable and the horrible aspects of experience, equally so. The atrocious fascinated him. The enchanting enchanted him.'
Literature was a shared passion. Dominique Aury once boasted that she had read all of Proust every year for five consecutive years. Novelist and cultural critic Regine Desforges, who became Aury's friend (and who interviewed 'Pauline Reage' in 1976, publishing the conversation as 'O m'a Dit, Confessions of O') remembers: 'Dominique Aury was fascinated by intelligence. The intelligence of Paulhan was obvious. And for her it became a kind of obsession.' Theirs was a relationship of minds as well as bodies, so it was fitting that, when she started to worry about losing him, she should try to win him back with sex in the head.
Jean Paulhan, a generation older than Dominique Aury, and in his early sixties when she wrote Story of O, was married twice. The first alliance produced a son; the second, to Germaine Dauptain, was overshadowed by her long illness with Parkinson's disease (she was already an invalid when he met Dominique Aury, although she would outlive him by four years). Jacqueline Paulhan, who married his son, told me that in addition to his long relationship with Dominique, there were also other women: 'My father-in-law was quite the ladies' man.'