My father described his infidelities “playfully, with only a dash of contrition.” That is a sentence I wrote in my novel The Monuments of Paris , and it is also, as closely as I can render it, something he actually said to me—sitting in his mechanized recliner in the sixteenth arrondissement, in his final years, as I sat on an ottoman beside him and held his knotty, bluish hand. He seemed to feel, he told me, that the intensity of his desire was sufficient justification for his exploits. How could he have suppressed such a need for conquest? Article continues after advertisement I wrote it down. I still don’t know what to do with it. My father married four times. He fathered eight children, of which I was the last. He was a philosopher, an editor, a maker of institutions, a man whose vanity was inseparable from his charm and whose charm was inseparable from his damage. He was what the French call a Balzacian character: not a type, exactly, but a force of nature given human form, overscaled and undeterred.…