François Mitterrand’s Letters To Anne Pingeot

We never know what the past has in store for us. Françoise Sagan’s expression has never seemed so apt as when applied to her friend François Mitterrand. We knew the “complex” and “romantic” aspects of the former president. But no one imagined that his romantic proclivities could have pushed him so far into the art of the double life.

On the one hand we have the cynical deceiver, the seasoned seducer, flitting from flower to flower; on the other, the sentimental poet, in love with great love, faithful and sincere to the point of despair in the manner of Stendhal. Extending between the two are so few bridges that one gets the impression of two different subjects inhabiting the same body, sharing the same brain, and producing two different results. The skills developed on the first stage are the arts of maneuver and manipulation of which the socialist leader was a past master, but these seem of little use in dealing with the dramas of pain and loneliness unfolding on the second stage (where François Mitterrand played the anti-Laclos, the amorous general who seduced women as one would lay siege to a city—and using virtually the same protocols).