While many people speculated that O had been written by a man, or was the work of two or more authors, Regine Desforges always saw it as a quintessentially female work (she also had good reason to know who the author was, because she had a serious relationship with Pauvert). 'I always knew it was written by a woman. It is absolutely a feminist work, empowering to women. For the first time, a woman is revealing her sex life, and it is the woman who dominates the situation, her feelings, her responses, her trajectory.'
It was agreed that the book would be published simultaneously in English by the Paris-based Olympia Press, a strange outfit which published a good deal of pornography, mainly for sale to sailors, but which was also the original publisher of Lolita, The Ginger Man, Naked Lunch and some works of Samuel Beckett.
Story of O came out quietly in June 1954 and didn't attract much attention until it won the Prix Deux Magots, nearly a year later, which also brought it to the notice of the Brigade Mondaine, the French vice squad. Pauvert, who had already faced 17 prosecutions in the preceding three years, noted: 'They were really very nice. We knew each other well.'
Paulhan, with his rather different reputation, was also hauled up to testify and dealt with them magisterially. After discoursing on the book's literary qual ity, he added that: 'Madame Reage, who is from an academic family which she feared to scandalise, has refused until now to reveal her name. If she should change her mind, I will ask her to get in touch with you.'
Dominique Aury's adored father had his own collection of erotic literature, which she had read as an adolescent (Les Liaisons Dangereuses was her favourite). Her mother was very different. 'She didn't like men,' Aury said. 'She didn't like women, either. She hated flesh.'
It may well have been to protect her that Dominique kept secret her authorship for so long. (She also, of course, had her position at Gallimard, and the publishing house's reputation, to think of.) Pola Rapaport thinks Aury's parents must have known; despite the secrecy, the Brigade Mondaine came to the apartment Dominique shared with them. On another occasion, a friend from the provinces reported that in her district it was rumoured that Dominique was the author.
Aury's son, Philippe d'Argila, the child of her very brief marriage in her twenties to a Catalan journalist, was himself in his twenties when O appeared. 'I didn't know she was the author,' he told me, speaking at the farmhouse outside Paris which he inherited from his mother. 'She never told me, really. I only found out in 1974, when there was talk of making a film and people came round to discuss it.' (A film, generally reckoned to be a rather pallid version of the book, was made, by Emmanuelle director Just Jaeckin). D'Argila says he was not shocked: 'I already knew her as a writer, and it is a very good book.'
Jacqueline Paulhan didn't find out Dominique was the author until the day of her father-in-law's burial. 'There was a very big bouquet of flowers with no name attached,' she told me. 'I was standing next to Dominique Aury, whom of course I knew well, and I remarked, "I suppose they must be from Pauline Reage." Dominique turned to me and said, "Mais Jacqueline, Pauline Reage, c'est moi."'
By the 1960s, according to Regine Desforges, some 12 or 15 people knew the true identity of Pauline Reage. In the 1970s and 1980s the numbers crept up. Philippe d'Argila recalls accompanying his mother to an event at which she was greeted by President de Gaulle with the words: 'Ah, the writer of Story of O !' (He thinks de Gaulle said it to shock his wife.) But the secret remained confined to an elite group of insiders until de St Jorre asked for and was granted an interview.