The son of Marguerite Duras, one of the most celebrated French authors of the 20th century, this week angrily denied claims his mother had been a prostitute in French Indo-China, worked for the Nazis and helped to torture a collaborator while allegedly having an affair with a French Gestapo agent.
Jean Mascolo, born shortly after his mother finished her first novel, Les Impudents, in 1943, said Laure Adler, a biographer, was distorting his mother's life. He allowed the writer to search through 18 boxes of documents found in Duras's flat on Paris's Left Bank, and at seaside and country homes.
Duras, who died in March 1996 aged 81, is at the centre of the biggest international literary industry of recent years, as biographers and critics rush to examine the books, plays and films which were almost entirely inspired by her own life.
Until now, Mascolo has kept out of the rows, even ignoring an Italian biographer's claim that he had proof Duras was the product of a liaison between her mother and a Chinese businessman.
Mascolo says some of the allegations in Adler's biography, due to be published by Gallimard at the end of the month, are "unbearable". He accuses Adler, a former cultural adviser to the late president Francois Mitterrand, of drawing on draft manuscripts his mother had thrown out.
Adler's account of Duras's life was already guaranteed to be the country's publishing event of the year after stories circulated that the real affair that inspired The Lover, Duras's account of an adolescent girl's affair with a Chinese man which was turned into a film, was not as romantic as the one portrayed in her book.
Adler claimed to have found a diary in which Duras said the relationship was arranged by her mother because her Chinese lover paid for sex and the money was used to settle debts incurred by Duras's brother.
"My grandmother was a rather stiff head-teacher who would never have sold her daughter," Mascolo said.
He first broke his silence after Adler said she had proof Duras worked as a senior official for the Vichy government, controlling the amount of paper given to favoured writers.
"This amounts to calling her a collaborationist," he said, adding that he also resented accusations that his mother, who was born in Saigon, was a fervent colonialist because she co-authored a book on the French Empire under her real name, Donnadieu.
"She was only the ghost writer for an old fellow, as well as being his mistress," he said.
Mascolo also rejects claims his mother had an affair with a Gestapo agent, Charles Delval, who arrested her husband, Robert Antelme.
"The story of my mother's relationship with Delval (who was executed) was not ambiguous," Mascolo said. "It was a beautiful story. My mother dined with the man who arrested her husband to try to save him."
He said Adler was wrong to use the 1985 novel La Douleur (The Pain) as proof that his mother joined in torture sessions after joining the Resistance. The book had been written 40 years after the event "when my mother's mind was wandering".
Another biographer, Alain Vircondelet, who had an affair with Duras, said all interpretations of her work were valid because "she invented her own life and legend".
She did not reveal the secret of her Chinese lover until she was 70, and she told Vircondelet she only realised the treachery of Vichy after her husband was arrested.
He added that if Duras had not participated in torture "she would have liked to, because she reached into the most obscure corners of human nature".