Francois Mitterrand's wife Danielle used to call her husband "the great seducer" - a reputation that has grown in the four years since the former French president died of cancer. After his wife, his doctor, his cook, numerous advisers, historians and a mistress, Mitterrand's bodyguard and driver of 20 years, Pierre Tourlier, has added his own first-hand account to what one book reviewer aptly calls "the permanent biography".
Like Mitterrand, Tourlier was a sentimental serial polygamist with a murky past. In Driving on the Left, published on March 14th, Tourlier defends the man he worshipped. He makes excuses for the medal Mitterrand received from the collaborationist Vichy regime, explains away the wiretappings he ordered and the Elysee suicide of a close Mitterrand aide known as "the pimp". Tourlier justifies Mitterrand's disastrous appointment of Edith Cresson as prime minister, and forgets to mention that the president lied publicly for years about his terminal cancer. For Tourlier, the man he nicknamed tonton (uncle) could do no wrong.
There is no such thing as a sex scandal in French political life. Gossip circulates, of course, but it would never occur to a political enemy or a newspaper to exploit a rival's bedroom adventures. The Lewinsky hearings would be unthinkable in France. If anything, a reputation for seduction seems to enhance a French politician's career.
Financial impropriety is an altogether different matter. Mitterrand's illegitimate daughter Mazarine Pingeot this month filed a lawsuit against Le Point magazine for suggesting that some of the hundreds of millions of francs diverted from the state-owned Elf Aquitaine oil company may have been intended for her and her mother. Yet no-one in the Mitterrand entourage has ever objected to tales of the late president's sexual affairs. Least of all Tourlier, to whom Mitterrand confided in an instantly famous quote, that some of his evenings unfolded "like a menu, with an entrie, entree, a main course and a dessert".
Tourlier learned the well-guarded secret of Mitterrand's double life in 1978, when he began nightly vigils outside the Saint-Germain-desPres apartment of Anne Pingeot, the attractive museum curator 30 years younger than Mitterrand who had given birth to Mazarine four years earlier. At the time, Mitterrand spent only a few hours with his second family every evening. When Tourlier caught pneumonia waiting in the cold, Mitterrand gave him the keys to his country home and told Tourlier to take a week off. Later, after he became president in 1981, Mitterrand installed Anne and Mazarine in the same Elysee annex where Tourlier lived with his own family. Their existence remained secret until Paris Match published a photograph of Mitterrand and Mazarine leaving a restaurant in 1994.
The book contains scenes of intense intimacy - Mitterrand waiting in the car while Tourlier fetches Mazarine at nursery school, then exploding with joy when he is alone with his tiny daughter; President Mitterrand asking Tourlier to drive him to the Elysee along the same route that Anne took to work on her bicycle, so the couple could exchange discreet signals in traffic.
Mitterrand somehow juggled the fate of France, a wife, a mistress, two families and an endless stream of conquests. He telephoned both Danielle and Anne several times a day. He had married Danielle in 1944, after they met in the French Resistance, and their union "was built on mutual respect", Tourlier writes. "He needed to hear her voice, to know she was well. She was a refuge for him, an indispensable accomplice, the fruit of their shared past . . . "
Anne Pingeot, on the other hand, was, "a passionate true love". In his last years, when Mitterrand was dying of prostate cancer, he made terrible, jealous scenes when Anne returned from business trips, demanding to know what men she had met and what they looked like.
Apparently, neither Danielle nor Anne is a jealous woman. One of Tourlier's duties was to gently evict discarded mistresses who showed up at Socialist Party functions. In the early 1990s, he claims, Christina Forsne, the Swedish journalist who later wrote a book about her affair with Mitterrand, got drunk and began shouting to Paris policemen that she was the president's mistress. On Mitterrand's instructions, Tourlier "intervened . . . with all necessary diplomacy". He continued in the role of female bouncer until the end, preventing several weeping former mistresses from entering the apartment Mitterrand shared with Anne and Mazarine, on the day of his death, January 8th, 1996.
"They told me they had to see him a last time. With difficulty, I made them understand that their place wasn't there . . . "
Mitterrand became the socialist leader in 1965, and for the rest of his life - or at least until prostate cancer ended his adventures - the party was his harem. Former mistresses were given jobs at the Elysee - to such an extent that Mitterrand referred to them as his cheptel or "livestock". Tourlier once discovered to his horror that an attractive party worker who invited him home lived in the very building where he had several times dropped off Mitterrand. On another occasion, a pretty socialist threw Tourlier out of her bed after receiving a midnight phone call. As he rushed away, Tourlier turned to see Mitterrand arrive in a taxi.
Tourlier confirms Mitterrand's interest in astrology, but implies that his visits to the horoscope writer Elisabeth Tessier "were motivated by, shall we say, the aesthetic tastes of Francois Mitterrand" and were abandoned because of the more pressing business of the 1991 Gulf War. Perhaps the most intriguing revelation is that of a nocturnal visit to "a queen from the near east" who, while on a state visit, invited Mitterrand to the Elysee guest house while the king was out. "Don't misunderstand," Mitterrand told Tourlier on leaving. "It was purely cultural and cerebral."
Mitterrand's admirers and enemies pay tribute to what a former female Gaullist minister privately calls his "universal seduction". During the 1986-88 "cohabitation" (coalition), Mitterrand did his best to charm right-wing cabinet ministers, male and female alike. Mitterrand told Tourlier that he wanted to be loved, and that seemed to apply to everyone - from the two young autograph seekers he invited to lunch on the day he left office to his successor as president, Jacques Chirac. For to be loved by others is to hold power over them.
Like Don Juan, Mitterrand was jealous in platonic male relationships too. Tourlier once used a brief holiday to work as a bodyguard for a race-car driver. Mitterrand learned of Tourlier's defection because Italian newspapers published photographs with the headline: "Francois Mitterrand lends his gorilla to Alain Prost". On Tourlier's return, a furious Mitterrand greeted him with the words: "What does he have that I don't, this Prost? How does he act with you?".
For all his conquests, Mitterrand's greatest love was the daughter whose existence he hid for 20 years. Tourlier describes a father besotted by the little girl for whom he learned to put up with cats and sing Bee Gees songs in the presidential car. Mitterrand's sons with Danielle, Gilbert and Jean-Christophe, are mentioned only once.
Mazarine, the love child, is the leitmotif of Tourlier's book. Today, at 25, Mazarine Pingeot's face eerily echoes Francois Mitterrand's. Her ambitions are to write novels, and to defend her father's honour.
Driving on the Left (Conduite a Gauche) by Pierre Tourlier is published in France by Denoel Impacts, price 99 French francs
