In 1929 Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, a young and successful writer in France who would later head the Nouvelle Revue Française, met Victoria at a luncheon in Paris. Drieu had just been married within the year, but this did not stop him from initiating a relationship with Victoria. Together the pair frequented bookstores, the Louvre museum, and the Notre-Dame.

When Drieu visited Buenos Aires in 1932, Victoria introduced him to Borges: the two men would nurture a “reciprocal affection.” Drieu later coined his famous phrase “Borges vaut le voyage” (“Borges makes the visit worthwhile”), inspired by the expression used by the well-known Michelin guides to name a country’s top attraction.

While in Buenos Aires, Drieu had a number of pieces published in the literary supplement of the daily La Nación, which was then headed by Eduardo Mallea. Later, he would write L’Homme à Cheval, a novel whose protagonist is based on Victoria. “I’ve instilled in him my bitter warmth for you,” Drieu confesses to her in a letter.

Victoria claimed that Drieu “was that child, fascinated and lost, who gave me his grown man’s hand and to whom I gave mine beneath the skies of Paris and London in those final days of winter… his ideas ended up distancing me from him.” Drieu would align himself with the Nazis. When on March 16, 1945 the writer committed suicide Victoria wrote in her Autobiografía V: “Oh, poor Pierre, you embodied France for me … How could you tolerate the same crimes in others that you could not stand in yourself?”