Les amitiés particulières

Les amitiés particulières is a 1943 novel by French writer Roger Peyrefitte, probably his best-known work today, which won the Prix Renaudot.

Largely autobiographical, it deals with an intimate relationship between two boys at a Roman Catholic boarding school and how it is destroyed by a priest's will to protect them from homosexuality.

Getting to know the other boys, he is immediately interested in Lucien Rouvière, of whom he is warned by the unsympathetic Marc de Blajan, who cryptically informs him that some of the students "may seem good, but are in fact not".

The shock of the boy's death, however, works a change of heart, and the novel ends with his attaining the same devotion to love that Alexandre had shown.

Peyrefitte was on (mostly) friendly terms with Henry de Montherlant, who in his later years wrote a novel (Les Garçons, 1969) about a similar relationship.