French film producer breaks his silence on wife's murder

Thirteen months after his wife Sophie was murdered in west Cork, the French film producer, Daniel Toscan du Plantier, has finally broken his silence about their relationship, the circumstances of her killing and his own life since she died."My silence was not caused by indifference," he said in an interview published in yesterday's Figaro. "Until now I said nothing out of a sense of decency, out of propriety. Sophie would have hated me talking about it. I hope she forgives me today.".Asked whether he has remarried, he said he has not "out of respect for Sophie" but that he would doubtless do so. "I am living with a woman who is expecting a child," he said."You have to respond to death with life. And I am happy about this child. It doesn't mean you don't love the marks left within you by the woman who has been taken from you. It doesn't lessen the misfortune that happened. The memory and the suffering remain." Media coverage of a man who has been questioned twice by gardai had added to his suffering: "People in Paris ask me for news about him . . . He's famous."Death by murder is like a double death", he said. "There is a will behind it. You say to yourself that somewhere on Earth is the person who did it; that there is a devil somewhere in the hills of southern Ireland."After his wife's murder he saw a newspaper with the headline, `The Trail of the French Lover'. "I thought I was going to faint," Mr Toscan du Plantier said. "Not that I couldn't refuse the idea that Sophie would have had a lover, but it wasn't the case! I know her life, and our relationship, well enough to know that. We loved each other. There had been times that were less easy, but [when she died] we were very close.".Mr Toscan du Plantier was upset by suggestions that his wife's visit to Ireland before Christmas 1996 implied a break-up. He had given her the house in Schull as a gift, and her last trip was the only one she made alone. "She wanted to go because the boiler was broken, and she didn't want the housekeeper to think she wasn't taking care of her house. None of us could go with her . . . And all of us who said `No' feel immense suffering over it today.".He was watching the evening television news alone in Toulouse when he heard that a French woman had been murdered near Cork. "They showed Schull on the map. Then I understood . . . She had been found that morning. It tells you a lot about how they worked from the first day. "The Irish told us nothing. Not a word . . . We still don't know exactly what time Sophie died. Her body lay on the path for 36 hours. Finally the French Foreign Minister, Mr Herve de Charette, told me officially that Sophie had been murdered. The first sign of humanity came from France."