'In one, the action dribbles out with no resolution; in the other, Aury merely says: 'Seeing herself about to be left by Sir Stephen, she preferred to die. To which he gave his consent.'
Dominique Aury told John de St Jorre: 'One day I found that I couldn't go on and that was all. Paulhan said it was all right. "You can stop now," he said.' Despite taking this level of direction, Aury insists that Paulhan had nothing to do with the writing beyond recommending that she remove one word, 'sacrificial'. (You have to wonder if this is some kind of in-joke, since the book is about nothing but sacrifice).
There seems no doubt that the style is all hers. Paulhan contributed a preface whose sentences have none of Pauline Reage's limpid clarity, and which is, in fact, extremely difficult to understand. Aury herself told de St Jorre even she couldn't make head or tail of it.
Paulhan took the book to their joint employer first. 'Gaston Gallimard said, "We can't publish books like this,"' Dominique Aury grumbled in the one television interview she gave after the news broke, when she was 87, 'though he had published Jean Genet, which was much nastier.' Jean-Jacques Pauvert, a young publisher who had already made a name for himself with 120 Days of Sodom and for whom resisting censorship was close to an ideology, remembers being given the book one December afternoon, reading it overnight and calling Paulhan excitedly the following morning. 'I woke him and said, "It's marvellous, it'll spark a revolution. So when do we sign the contract?"'
Pauvert, a round-faced man who looks scarcely any different now from the way he did in photographs when he was in his twenties, says he had known Dominique Aury 12 years before he was handed the book. 'I recognised her style immediately when I saw the manuscript. She is a great writer and absolutely uncopyable.' Paulhan, he adds, could not write like that; his style was drier and more academic.