THE widow of President Francois Mitterrand, Danielle, has revealed how she coped with her husband's passion for politics and his affairs with other women in her memoirs published yesterday, two months after his death from cancer.
The intensely private Mrs Mitterrand (71) gave her version of their life together from their meeting during the Resistance to the former president's decision that he no longer wanted to fight against his advancing prostate cancer at the beginning of this year. She had no regrets, she said.
She described how, on January 1st of this year, he told her of his decision that he would no longer eat, so that he could die before his mind became affected. He died on January 8th. Since then, she said, she had received 18,000 letters, mostly of support.
The book, En Toutes Liberte's (In Total Freedom), is also a fierce defence of her husband, whose memory has come in for criticism in recent books, notably from his former doctor.
Dr Claude Gubler claimed that Mr Mitterrand knew he was suffering from cancer as early as 1981, yet still stood for re election in 1988. Mrs Mitterrand said her husband did not tell her of his illness until 1991. The proceeds of the book will go to Mrs Mitterrand's human rights foundation, France Liberte's, which she established 10 years ago.
In the whirl of wartime events, the then Danielle Gouze had known Francois Mitterrand only five months when they married in 1944. She was just 20, he eight years older. She was to discover immediately my first and main rival politics". At their wedding reception, even before they had cut the cake, Mr Mitterrand became restless and whispered to her that he had to leave for a meeting with former prisoners of war.
"An appointment today? The day of.... I'm coming with you, she said. If you want, was his reply. "It was in a wedding dress, at the back of a smoke filled room that I understood that I must also wed his raison d'etre," she wrote.
That raison d'etre was to take the ambitious young politician away from home often in the early years of their marriage. His absences were made far worse when the couple's first child, Pascal, died in his third month, plunging Danielle into a deep depression.
The young wife also had to cope with the realisation that her husband was attractive to other women. "I saw very clearly how my husband excelled in seducing young women he met."
In an interview in L'Express magazine, published yesterday, Mrs Mitterrand described her reaction. "I remember the anger I felt in the first years of our marriage when I saw his charm. It infuriated, infuriated me."
She said she became more circumspect. "Yes, I had married seducer, and I had to live with it. She said the birth of Mr Mitterrand's daughter, Mazarine, by his Ms Anne Pingeot, in 1974 was neither a discovery nor a drama for me. I accepted it. I turned my back on the good souls' who were indignant about it."
It was her idea, she said, to invite Mazarine and her mother to take their places beside Mr Mitterrand's coffin at the funeral.
"You have to admit," she told L'Express, "that a being is capable of loving someone passionately, and then, as the years pass, he loves them in another way, perhaps more deeply, and that he can fall in love with someone else. It is complete hypocrisy to want to pass judgment on that."