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So it's a surprise to meet sunny 79-year-old Genevieve Laporte, with her laugh lines, throaty chuckle, floral-print dress and white orthopedic shoes comfy for walking the dog. She survived Picasso and then some becoming an award-winning poet and documentary filmmaker.

Starting when she was 24, Laporte had a two-year secret affair with the 70-year-old master. She was a beautiful, tousle-haired former Resistance fighter, and Picasso sketched her over and over: naked in bed, in a fantasy wedding gown, in a prim sailor sweater.

On June 27, Laporte will sell 20 of Picasso's sketches in Paris. They're worth an estimated 1.5-2 million ($1.8-2.4 million), and they show a soft, smitten side of the womanizing genius.

"I want to get the message out about who Pablo was," Laporte told The Associated Press in an interview. "He was a tender man, respectful, intelligent, timid. Not at all the abominable snowman we're used to hearing about."

Then again, Laporte says, maybe she simply got out in time, before the affair turned sour. After she left Picasso, the artist Jean Cocteau told her, "You just saved your skin."

Laporte met the artist when she was 17, assigned to interview him for the school newspaper. "Monsieur Picasso, young people don't understand your painting," she told him.

An unusual friendship was born. The two drank hot chocolate, and Picasso recommended books. It was innocent at least on her side.

"I was certainly perfectly naive," Laporte said. "He told me (later), 'you can't imagine how much I wanted to touch your hair, but I didn't dare.' ... He could have been my grandfather! Oh la la, if he had touched my hair, I would have taken off running."

Seven years later, after she had traveled the United States and begun working, Laporte saw Picasso again at his apartment.

She blames her seduction on a late-afternoon storm.

"I said I was going to go home. And at that moment, I swear, it was like in a fairy tale," she said. "The room grew dark, and through the skylight I saw a sky like I've never seen before, except in Congo during tropical storms.

"He told me, 'wait a little while, there's going to be a storm,'" Laporte said. "And bada boom: lightning, thunder, hail."

And then?

"I have no memory of what happened next," she said demurely.

The two had their on-and-off affair when Picasso was with the painter Francoise Gilot. The mother of two of his children, Gilot was another rare woman with the guts to dump Picasso instead of suffering.

Picasso took a break from Gilot in the summer of 1951 to vacation in Saint Tropez with Laporte, the poet Paul Eluard and his wife Dominique. Laporte remembers it as a golden time.

Many sketches from the vacation bear the inscription "For Genevieve." One Cubist-style drawing shows Picasso's face hidden in Laporte's tangled hair. When the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg showed the sketches, it called them his Genevieve period, or Tender period.

Picasso asked Laporte to move in with him two years later. But the request was distressing: Gilot had just left him, and Picasso wanted Laporte to live in their house on the French Riviera.

"His ex-girlfriend leaves one morning, and he asks me to move in to the (same) house the next day," she said. "Would you have gone? Anywhere but there!"

So Laporte got on with her life. She married a fellow former Resistance fighter in 1959 and had a son. She made 18 documentary films in Africa. In 1999, she won a prize from the prestigious Academie Francaise for her poetry volume La sublime porte des songes (The Sublime Door of Dreams).

Over the decades, Laporte kept Picasso's sketches in a safe because she was worried about thieves. Now seemed like a good time to part with them.

"I'm at the end of my road," she said.