eccentric uncles. Mobilised in 1916, he was wounded and decorated. Marked by his experience of war, he wrote Songe ('Dream'), an autobiographic novel, as well as his Chant funèbre pour les morts de Verdun (Funeral Chant for the Dead at Verdun), both exaltations of heroism during the Great War. His work was part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1924 Summer Olympics. Montherlant first achieved critical success with the 1934 novel Les Célibataires, and sold millions of copies of his tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles, written from 1936 through 1939. 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 of street boys. During the Second World War after the fall of France in 1940 he remained in Paris and continued to write plays, poems, essays, and worked as a war correspondent. 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 initially described the German victory as evidence of the superiority of a virile, conquering race. Still, after Liberation he was not treated as harshly as those who openly and enthusiastically collaborated; the Committee for the Purification of Writers sentenced him in 1945 to only to one year of abstinence from publishing. In 1960, he was elected to a lifetime position at the Académie Française. Some time in 1968, according to Roger Peyrefitte, outside a movie theatre in Paris, 72-year-old Montherlant was attacked and beaten up by a group of youths because he had groped the younger brother of one of them. Montherlant was seriously injured and blinded in one eye as a result. The British writer Peter Quennell, who edited a collection of translations of his works, recalled that Montherlant attributed the eye injury to "a fall" instead; and mentions in confirmation that Montherlant suffered from vertigo. After going almost blind in his later years and becoming the target of scorners like Peyrefitte, Montherlant died in 1972 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after swallowing a cyanide capsule. His ashes were scattered by Jean-Claude Barat and Gabriel Matzneff in Rome, at the Forum, among the Temple of Portunus and into the Tiber. His standard biography was written by Pierre Sipriot, and published in two volumes (1982 and 1990),