The oath of secrecy about my father, by Mitterrand’s love child
THE love child of the former French president, François Mitterrand, has disclosed how her schoolfriends were sworn to keep the closely guarded secret of her father’s identity.
In a rare interview, Mazarine Pingeot, 40, the daughter of Mr Mitterrand and his mistress Anne Pingeot, said she “could not invite friends home until she was sure of them, until they had passed the test. They had to be taken into the secret.”
Ms Pingeot was 19 when her existence became public towards the end of her father’s 14-year presidency in 1994. When asked to fill out forms at school asking for her father’s occupation, she would either “leave them blank or make something up”.
She told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper that her father’s close friends all knew about her.
“The friends in our close circle all shared the secret,” she said. “For my father, it was important to have this circle in which he could lead a normal life.”
One of his confidants, André Rousselet, published his memoirs this month, revealing how Mr Mitterrand introduced him to Mazarine in 1981, shortly before being elected president, saying simply: “I have a daughter.”
“My mother and André often told me about it, but I don’t remember it,” she said. “I was not yet six.” She said Mr Rousselet, 93, was “always there, like an uncle” throughout her childhood.
In his memoirs, he describes Mr Mitterrand’s “infinite tenderness” towards his daughter. Mr Rousselet sought to justify the expense of maintaining Mazarine and her mother in a state-owned flat and having them guarded by the se- curity services, which caused public outrage after their existence was revealed. The disclosure that he had a mistress and a second family, however, provoked little opprobrium.
Despite the trauma of keeping her identity secret, which she described in a book and which drove her to seek therapy, Ms Pingeot said she still admired Mitterrand. “People come and talk to me about him spontaneously and their voices always tremble,” she said.
She has always insisted that the outwardly cold president, nicknamed the Sphinx, was an attentive father. “He used to make me recite the names of the kings of France,” she said. “He liked capitals too.”
Mazarine was not Mitterrand’s only secret. He also tried to hide the fact that he had prostate cancer, although according to some accounts it was diagnosed around the time that he came to power. It became public only in 1992, three years before his death.