Mitterrand and his mistress
Unlike Haughey, the late French president understood that a great affair makes for an enhanced legacy, writes Donal Lynch
IT was another brilliant lesson from the French to the world in How To Have (And How To Be) A State Mistress. Forget cashing in your chips in the form of some sordid chat-show revelation, or squirrelling away a semen-stained dress as ‘proof ’ of the liaison. Forget hiding behind lawyers and spouses, or retreating to conventional morality when caught out. Forget implausible denials. The Mitterrand letters, excerpts of which were published this past week, have rewritten the rules of political indiscretion.
They showed that as long as there was love, there is also public forgiveness. Even for a man who was reviled in his lifetime as a ‘quasi-pharaoh’. Even for a woman — Anne Pingeot — dismissed until recently as the ‘other woman’ of a corrupt and bygone political establishment. And even for a liaison which Mitterrand himself described (in reference to the great age difference between him and Pingeot) as “perfect incest”.
Parisian literary critics were reported to be swooning over the stylistic sweep of the letters. The BBC observed that ‘The Great Seducer’, as Mitterrand was known in his lifetime, has seduced his country one more time.
This is because, unlike his philandering counterparts in other countries — our own included — Mitterrand seems to have understood that the letters, and the affair, would play a role in how his legacy was perceived. More than one French critic has pointed out that they seem to have been written with one eye to Unsurprisingly, then, the missives began almost immediately after the affair began.
Mitterrand and Pingeot met in 1963, when she was barely 20 years old and he was a 47-year-old senator, already a cabinet minister many times over, and married with two teenage sons. They quickly became infatuated with each other. By the following year, he was writing to her: “When I met you I realised immediately that I was undertaking a great journey.
“There will never be absolute night for me again. The solitude of my death will be less solitude, Anne, my love.”
His writing was florid, sensual and sincere. In a letter dated July 16, 1970, he writes: “I love you as one loves one’s child,” and later confesses. “... the joy that flows in me when I hold your mouth, the possession that burns me with all the fires of earth, my blood gushing in the depth of you, your pleasure that surges from the volcano of our bodies...”
In France, the symphonic swoon of Mitterrand’s prose has been contrasted with the inelegant literalness of other, more contemporary Gallic affairs: “With Carla [Bruni], it’s for real!” Nicolas Sarkozy; and “I hereby declare I have brought to a close my shared life with Valerie Trierweiler,” Francois Hollande (via an official statement).
Of course, Mitterrand benefits from the warm glow of nostalgia, but few, if any other politicians of his era, have seen the story of their extra-marital relationships enhance their legacies.
Even JFK’s dalliances are still remembered in the most sordid terms. I interviewed one of his former girlfriends, Mimi Alford, who wrote of being ordered by Kennedy to perform oral sex on another man at a party in Bing Crosby’s house. Like Monica Lewinsky, a few decades later, she had no proof of love, so allegation of lust had to suffice. As with so many of Kennedy’s old flames, the book royalties eventually became her pension.
We might also compare the reaction in France to our own attitudes to political affairs made public. Mitterrand was shrewd enough to know that his letter writing would one day obliterate any small-minded analysis of his indiscretions (we may disapprove of cinq a sept, the thinking went, but we cannot argue with amour).
In writing them, he both bequeathed a spiritual and financial legacy to the now 73-year-old Pingeot and copper-fastened her own claim to having been the most important woman in his life. He treated her badly at times, but allowing her ownership of the story was the honourable thing to do and it has been repaid. She consented to the publication of the letters, only on condition that she would have to take no part in the promotion of the book. Mitterrand must surely have known that she would never have to lower herself to this; the letters speak for themselves.
Contrast this with the treatment of Terry Keane by Charlie Haughey. For more than a decade, Haughey tolerated her teasing about their relationship in the Keane Edge column of the Sunday Independent, and a nation feasted on the intrigue while wondering how their respective spouses felt about it all.
It was a comfortingly inclusive in-joke and Terry united the country in what she called “pseudo disapproval and utter fascination”. And yet, between the lines of the stiletto-sharp quips, there was an abiding love — she once called him “The Greatest Living Irishman”.
He ended it in 1999 and asked her to return her mementoes. He also told her, by her account, that she would be a footnote in history.
She subsequently went on The Late Late Show and told the whole story. It seemed crass, but it was also an unpublication. derstandable reaction. She wanted the world to know. A lifetime had elapsed by then. They were more like husband and wife — she spoke of snuggling up on a couch — a far cry from the Gatsby-esque visions conjured by her column.
She deserved a little more recognition from him. Her Late Late interview was enough to engender some unlikely sympathy for the old warhorse who, by that stage, was spending his days being questioned at Dublin castle.
Haughey sensed that Terry would not have the public on her side and she herself regretted the interview, calling it “the most selfish thing I’ve ever done”. And yet, perhaps the desire to be more than a footnote, to hold on to the memories, to be acknowledged, was not entirely grandiose. She remained one of the most central elements of Haughey’s story as we all remember it.
In last year’s RTE drama on the life of the former Taoiseach, Mitterrand was depicted instructing him in the art of preparing and ingesting an ortolan. The late French president might also have schooled Charlie in the art of mistress management. Denying Terry left a space for others to fill in the details.
The jewels, the furs and the winking gossip-column mentions that defined the Sweetieera all added to the picture of a gangster and his moll. The excesses get caricatured in the television retelling.
There was a compelling, grand romance that got obscured, principally because he left her to speak about it alone. He ought to have known that she would be as big a part of his legacy as any political achievement. We always knew Haughey was capable of cynicism and corruption. But if we had known that, like his old pal Mitterrand, he was also capable of big romantic love, we might well remember him differently.
‘Mitterrand’s writing was florid, sensual and sincere’