Wilfred De’ath

The British press, on the death of Jacques Chirac, aged 86, in September, was quick to point out that, as well as being President of France from 1995 to 2003, he was a beer-swilling, chain-smoking philanderer and embezzler of public funds.

The French press largely ignored most of this and concentrated on his virtues. The forgiving French seem to have forgotten most of his peccadilloes. Also, let’s face it, they identified with their president because most of them had got up to the same things – drinking, smoking and womanising – in their own lives.

I couldn’t help wondering if the pardoning propensity of the French is one of the main reasons I have chosen to live out my declining years in this beautiful country. I share a lot of Chirac’s faults. I don’t smoke and I drink only moderately but I have been a womaniser (in fact, a sex addict) in my time – more than 100 mistresses over 35 years – and if not paying hotel bills counts as embezzlement, then I’m guilty of that, too.

Chirac was known to his many mistresses (mostly attractive lady employees at the Hôtel de Ville when he was the Mayor of Paris) as ‘Monsieur cinq minutes, la douche y comprise’ (‘The man who takes only five minutes, including the shower’). His wife, Bernadette, ignored his infidelities and always stood by him. Chirac once said, after negotiating with Margaret Thatcher, ‘What does that housewife want – my balls on a plate?’

Well, that might have solved his sex problem. My own wife got fed up with my adulteries à la Boris Johnson and went off with another man.

For making off with thousands of euros of public funds when he was Mayor, Chirac received only a two-month (suspended) prison sentence. I got two years (suspended, admittedly) for failing to pay a £500 hotel bill. The British courts in these matters are much harsher than the French ones and the sentences more severe.

There is another matter that Chirac chose not to reveal to the voters. He was a great lover of art, African art in particular, which he calculated would not appeal to his philistine, largely bourgeois audience.

He was right about that. I am not a great lover of African art – although the hotel I am currently occupying is saturated in it – but I read a great deal, which Chirac apparently never did.

I tend to keep this to myself, since I have a horror of any kind of intellectual snobbery. Still, it is a shock to me when I am talking to students about journalism, which I am occasionally invited to do, to find that they have not only never read Jane Austen, the Brontës, James Joyce, Elizabeth Taylor, Virginia Woolf etc but have never heard of them! The only writer they have heard of is George Orwell because Animal Farm and 1984 are on the syllabus.

Speaking as the George Orwell de nos jours, I am appalled by this. Their teachers always explain to me, after my talk, that their students are too busy studying within their own discipline to do any reading outside it. I wonder what dear Jacques – so adept at extracurricular activities – would have to say about that!