Marcel Jouhandeau was born in 1888 in Guéret (Limousin region) and died in 1979 in Rueil-Malmaison. He lived in Paris since 1908 and was a student at the Sorbonne, where he began to write. From 1912 he was a teacher at a school in Passy. Very religious, he embraced a form of Catholicism of a mystical nature, and his whole life oscillated between the celebration of the masculine body and the mortifying experience of sexuality, to the point that, in 1914, in an outburst and being carried away by his contradictory feelings , Jouhandeau burned all his writings and tried to commit suicide. In 1949 he married the ballerina Élisabeth Toulement, friend of Jean Cocteau and Max Jacob. This opened a period in which he retracted his homosexual tendencies and, later, re-abandoned himself to them. Author of more than twenty works, among them Pincegrain (1924), Monsieur Godeau marié (1933), Chaminadour (1934-1941) or Journaliers (1961-1978), considered by many to be cursed, anti-Jewish and collaborationist, he is considered a «dissector »Of the human soul, from which it searches for its best kept secrets.