Henry de Montherlant

Henry de Montherland was a well-known French writer, dramatist and essayist, who was born to a wealthy Catholic royalist family, and had close relations with his mother and his grandmother. He had home teachers and went to the Catholic Collège of Sainte-Croix at Neuilly from 1911-16. He had to leave this school because of his intimate relationship with a younger male pupil. Nevertheless he concealed his homosexual tendencies from the public during his lifetime.

His experiences from WWI were summarized in his autobiographic novel Le Songe, and after the war he decided to become a writer. His first themes were youth, war, and bullfighting. From 1925 he travelled to Spain and Northern Africa, returning to Paris in the 1930s. His biggest success came with the trilogy Les jeunes filles (The Young Girls) which sold millions of copies and was translated into 13 languages.

In 1940 de Montherlant became a war correspondent and was busy with the International Red Cross between 1942-45. After WWII he devoted himself fully to writing plays. In 1968, he was attacked and beaten in the streets of Paris, from which he was severely injured and blinded in one eye. At the age of 76 he committed suicide, taking a cyanide capsule and shooting himself in the head.

Even as a teenager, de Montherlant was a bullfighter. He later became a football goalkeeper and also a regular visitor to sporting events. In the years before 1924 he had written a series of articles for magazines highlighting a romantic and poetic side of sport. In volume 31 of the “Green Papers” of publisher Grasset he published in 1924 a collection of these texts under the title Le Paradis a l’Ombre des Épées (The Paradise in the Shadow of Swords) as part 1 of the series “Les Olympiques”. Two more volumes were released in the years 1926 and 1929. In general, later editions include only smaller texts from the third volume in addition to the complete texts of the first two volumes.