Today, Catherine Millet is best known simply as Catherine M, the Parisian nymphomaniac who made bookish types frisky with her 2001 memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. But for three decades she was known only to the French chattering classes as a respected art critic and curator. Her matronly dress sense and dumpy build betrayed none of her dissolute instincts.
'As a child,' reads the memoir's opening line, 'I thought about numbers a great deal.' And three pages later, Millet is recounting her first experience of group sex - aged 18, just weeks after losing her virginity. Though reticent in everyday interactions, she gained confidence through being the girl who never said no. She didn't flirt but was always available to men, regardless of their age, shape or how many she had already serviced in one night.
Of all her sexual partners, which must number in the thousands, Millet remembers only 49 names. For every orgy in a chic apartment, there was sex in railway stations, tractor-trailers and cemeteries, in the stands of sports stadiums, on park benches and on car bonnets.
But Millet - now 60, and with her swinging lifestyle long behind her - protests that there was nothing unusual about her experiences. 'There are millions of people in the world with the same sort of sexual practices,' she says.
To foreign observers, the book was a typically Gallic mixture of po-faced philosophy and outr? sex from a tradition that produced the Marquis de Sade, George Bataille and Pauline Reage's Story of O. Gay novelist Edmund White praised it as 'one of the most explicit books about sex ever written by a woman'. But writing in Liberation newspaper, late philosopher Jean Baudrillard carped: 'If one lifts one's skirt, it is to show one's self, not to show oneself naked like the truth.'
The sexual autobiography was translated into nearly 40 languages and sold 400,000 copies in France alone. Since then, two of Millet's books on art have appeared in English - Contemporary Art in France in 2006 and, now, Dali and Me, which focuses on the surrealist painter's little-known essays and autobiographical writings.
Born in Catalonia, Spain, Salvador Dali lived in Paris for much of his adult life and mostly wrote in French. 'Dali is still a taboo subject in France,' Millet says. 'French critics are attached to the notion of the cursed artist like Vincent van Gogh and don't like successful artists.' Dali's embrace of the fascist General Franco also taints his reputation, but Millet dismisses it as 'just another provocation'.