Born in Paris, a descendant of an aristocratic (yet obscure) Picard family, he was educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and the Sainte-Croix boarding school at Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Henry's father was a hard-line reactionary (to the extent of despising the post-Dreyfus Affair army as too subservient to the Republic, and refusing to have electricity or the telephone installed in his house).

Together with other five youngsters he had founded a group called 'La Famille' (the Family), a kind of order of chivalry whose members were bonded by an oath of fidelity and mutual assistance.

According to Montherlant this "special friendship" had raised the fierce and jealous opposition of abbé de La Serre, who managed to get the older boy expelled.

This incident (and Giquel) became a lifelong obsession for Montherlant, who would depict it in the 1952 play La Ville dont le prince est un enfant and his 1969 novel Les Garçons.

In these years Montherlant, a well-to-do heir, traveled extensively, mainly to Spain (where he met and worked with bullfighter Juan Belmonte), Italy, and Algeria, giving vent to his passion for sexually abusing street boys.

At the height of his fame when the war broke out (he had been awarded the Grand Prix by the prestigious Académie Française in 1934), he described the German victory as evidence of the superiority of a virile, conquering race.

He was in a "round-table" of French and German intellectuals who met at the Georges V Hotel in Paris in the 1940s, including the writers Ernst Jünger, Paul Morand and Jean Cocteau, the publisher Gaston Gallimard and the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt.

[12] Montherlant wrote articles for the Paris weekly, La Gerbe, directed by the pro-Nazi novelist and Catholic reactionary Alphonse de Châteaubriant.

[13] Montherlant treated pederastic themes in his work, including his play La Ville dont le prince est un enfant (1952) and novel Les Garçons (The Boys), published in 1969 but written four or five decades earlier.

He maintained a private and coded correspondence with Roger Peyrefitte — author of Les Amitiés particulières (Special Friendships, 1943), also about relationships between boys at a Roman Catholic boarding school.

[19] In the short film Das kleine Chaos the character portrayed by Fassbinder himself reads aloud from a paperback German translation of Les Jeunes Filles, a book which he claims to have stolen.