Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  On Saturday October 7, he boarded a Concorde for New York, accompanied by Dr Tarot and two bodyguards, and then travelled on to Denver and the Rocky Mountains, where the conference was to be held in the ballroom of the Broadmoor Hotel, a Gatsby-era palace emulating the grandeur of St Moritz and Gstaad. Bush had organised it to raise funds for his presidential library.

  During the debate on Sunday afternoon, Mitterrand spoke frankly of his qualms about German reunification. ‘The question,’ he said, ‘had been whether [it] was a certainty or whether it could be avoided.’ His conclusion, he told the audience of American multimillionaires, had been that it was not avoidable. Afterwards, in a television interview, he drove home that point. ‘The problem was not whether one liked [the idea of reunification] or whether one did not like it. It was to know whether there was any force on earth – other than brutal Soviet military force – which could stop [it].’ Gorbachev, he said, had had neither the will nor the ability to do so, and as a result it had taken place peacefully.

  Mitterrand was glad he had come. ‘It was a pleasure talking to George Bush,’ he said afterwards, ‘and even more with Margaret Thatcher . . . She’s a character, a real character. There’s a complicity between us which can only be explained by the difference in our beliefs.’ His relationship with ‘Dear Mrs Thatcher’, as he called her, always made him smile:

  Her inimitable mixture of firmness and tactical flexibility . . . consisted of presenting her setbacks in a glorious light. That is how the philosopher’s stone works today. [It] transforms a political failure into success. It was all the easier for her because she was an accomplished practitioner of this kind of alchemy, to which she gave herself every time she returned from a European summit so that in her own country her ideas, which were always rejected [by her partners], won her, after a proud speech before the House of Commons, a Roman triumph.5

  But the journey had exhausted him. In New York, on the way back, he was tempted to stay an extra day for a last look at a city whose architectural purity he adored. However, after 15 minutes walking among the skyscrapers, near the Waldorf Astoria, his strength gave out. His bodyguards found him a seat in the atrium of a bank where it took him three-quarters of an hour to summon up the energy to go back.

  On his return to Paris, Mitterrand, as de Gaulle had done before him, approved the creation of a historical foundation which would bear his name, the Institut François Mitterrand, financed – like Bush’s library – by wealthy benefactors. But his heart was still set on a book to define his image for posterity, the book which Benamou had been unable to write. Serge July called it his ‘passion for rectification . . . Everything which he or those around him thought had been wrongly understood – which meant by and large everything which had been understood correctly but which might give him a bad image – he tried to rectify or reshape, and when it was necessary he would reshape it ten times.’ He would have preferred to oversee the whole process himself. But since it was too late for that, it was a matter of finding someone to write it that he could trust.

  Earlier that year Jean Lacouture, who had written an unsurpassed biography of de Gaulle, had approached him to ask whether he would consider cooperating on the story of his life. Mitterrand had hesitated. Lacouture was not from his political camp. But at the end of September, when it was clear that Mémoires would not do the job, he invited him to come round.

  A month later, after his return from America, when Lacouture made his next visit, Mitterrand’s condition had changed for the worse. The writer was escorted through a double door to a small, bare, white room, where he found Mitterrand ‘sunk into his bed, very pale, with his head, like white marble, buried amid the sheets’. It was a measure of his decline, Lacouture reflected, that such a proud, fastidious man would allow himself to be seen in such a state.

  Mentally he was alert. ‘So? What are you going to write about me?’ he asked. Lacouture replied that he envisaged a book placing his life in the context of ‘France and the French, with their faults and their qualities’. Mitterrand made a feint: ‘Yes, I’m French, but I’m from Aquitaine.’ However, the idea pleased him and the following month he gave his consent. Lacouture was as good as his word. Three years later he entitled his biography, Mitterrand: une histoire de Français (‘A Frenchman’s story’). It was an excellent book, balanced, curiously affectionate and scrupulously fair. But Mitterrand would probably have been disappointed. It did not have quite the same magic as Lacouture’s relation of the life of Charles de Gaulle, partly, perhaps, because the material was not the same. One was the stuff of Shakespearian drama, the other of Racine. The two men had lived their lives by very different scripts. Even beyond the grave, the rivalry lingered.

  The end of October 1995 marked the start of Mitterrand’s 80th year. He celebrated quietly at home with Anne. A week later he flew to Latche for the delayed anniversary of his wedding with Danielle.

  Throughout November he continued to work on Mémoires and De l’Allemagne, de la France. But his strength was slowly ebbing away. There were better days and worse days. One weekend he was well enough to visit André Rousselet at Beauvallon, across the water from St Tropez, where he had spent the first Christmas after his escape in 1941. In December he made a last trip to Gordes. At other times he was barely able to stand. For his daily promenade in the Champ de Mars, one of his bodyguards carried a folding stool so that if he could not get from one park bench to the next, he could sit down between. Often he turned back after only a few minutes. He told Marie de Hennezel, a psychologist specialising in help for the terminally ill, who had become a friend: ‘We are each of us in an aircraft which one day will finish by crashing into a mountainside. Most people forget about it. Me, I think about it every day. But perhaps that is because I already glimpse the mountain through the window.’

  By then he had come to terms with the fact that he was not going to be cured. The only question, he wrote, was ‘how to die?’ ‘Dying is as easy as being born,’ de Hennezel assured him. ‘The body is ready. It understands [both].’

  But in his case there was a second, more delicate question: where to be buried? Danielle had wanted him to be interred in the cemetery at Cluny, her family home. He had refused. That would be too much of a slap in the face for Anne. The best answer would be the family crypt at Jarnac, where only a single place remained.6 But how to arrange that without upsetting Danielle, who had told him that she wanted to be buried at his side? He resorted to a pirouette. She had proposed buying a plot of land on Mount Beuvray in the Nièvre, where Vercingetorix was said to have united the Gauls against Rome in 52 BC. He agreed and the contract was signed in May. Three months later all hell broke loose. The proposed burial plot, 10 metres square, was on a protected archaeological site and had been made over to them illegally by the local Socialist mayor. If Mitterrand did not organise the leak that triggered the scandal, it certainly served his purpose. Once it was splashed across every front page, he could tell Danielle with a straight face that he ‘wanted to sleep peacefully’ and at Mount Beuvray that would no longer be possible.7 Burial at Jarnac was the only solution.

  Just as the apartment in the rue Frédéric Le Play was in theory neutral ground, but in fact Anne lived there, so the family crypt, where Danielle could not follow, was also a gesture in Anne’s direction. Danielle might be his wife, the gesture said, but even in death, she did not own him.

  One more challenge remained. Marie de Hennezel had told him that the best way for a terminally ill person to cope with the approach of death was to set a series of goals to be accomplished beforehand. Mitterrand’s last goal was to return to Egypt, where, almost every winter since the 1980s, he had spent Christmas at the Old Cataract Hotel at Aswan on the Nile. Dr Tarot encouraged him. The journey was suicidal for a dying man – but better that he should spend his final weeks living the life he wished. Mitterrand had no desire to end like his friend, Jean Riboud, who had spent his last ten months in a wheelchair after his cancer metastasised into his spine. ‘
I’m counting on you to make sure that no one will ever see me shrivelled up like a vegetable, mindless and bedridden,’ he told Michel Charasse. ‘You must do everything to spare me that.’

  The tests he had had in mid-December had been inconclusive. But he knew that he did not have much time left. He told his brother, Robert, ‘I don’t think I shall keep going for another two months’. When his publisher, Odile Jacob, informed him that she was planning a launch party for Mémoires in February, he smiled and said, ‘I shan’t be there any more.’ De Hennezel was another frequent visitor that month. ‘It’s not a big deal,’ he told her. ‘But it takes so long, this business of dying.’

  On Christmas Eve, Mitterrand, accompanied by Anne and Mazarine, Jean-Pierre Tarot and his family, the Rousselets and four others, boarded an airliner sent by the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, to fly to Aswan. At the Old Cataract, the Presidential Suite, which Mitterrand occupied, boasted a spacious private terrace, the only one in the hotel, with a view across the Nile to Elephantine Island, an old ivory-trading centre on the border between Egypt and Lower Nubia. The sight of the river seemed to put fresh vigour into him and, to Rousselet’s amusement, Mitterrand found the energy to flirt with his friend’s young wife, Anouchka.

  They spent Christmas Day on a felucca, sailing among the islands. Mitterrand, in a deckchair in the shade of the single lateen sail, was lost in reveries. But the effort was too much for him. The following days he remained cloistered in his suite. He had originally intended to stay on until the New Year. But on Friday morning, December 29, he telephoned Mubarak to apologise for not being able to join him for lunch and explained that he would have to return to France. His physical weakness, coupled with Mazarine’s desire to get back to Paris to be with her boyfriend, had got the better of him. That afternoon the Egyptian President’s jet carried them back to Biarritz.

  Two days later, at Latche, Danielle organised a New Year’s Eve dinner. There were twenty at table. At Mitterrand’s request, Henri Emmanuelli had managed to find some ortolans – small buntings, which are drowned in Armagnac and pan-roasted – a centuries-old delicacy in south-western France which has since been outlawed, the birds having been declared a protected species. It was not the orgiastic last supper which subsequent accounts alleged.8 Mitterrand arrived from his sheepcote after all the others and sat apart, in an armchair, with a low table beside him and an ottoman where his guests came, one by one, to sit and talk. The meal was lavish – oysters, foie gras and capon, as well as the ortolans – and he tried everything. But unlike the previous year, when he had joined them at table and eaten the small birds whole in the traditional manner, so hot that the eater has to hide his mouth behind a napkin, this time Jack Lang had to help him, cutting one up into small pieces. Shortly before 11 p.m., he left, supported by Tarot, after sweeping the table with a long, silent gaze which re-echoed like an adieu.

  The following day, Monday, he would only drink tea and, in the evening, a bowl of soup. He refused his medicine. Next day he had nothing to eat either. He told Jean Munier he felt the cancer was becoming general. In the afternoon Tarot chartered a plane to fly him to Paris for new tests. The results confirmed that it had metastasised to his brain.

  Back at the apartment he cloistered himself in his monk’s cell of a room, agreeing only to a glucose drip so that it could not be said that he had starved himself to death. ‘He stopped fighting,’ Tarot said. Jean-Christophe, whom he called back from a business trip to the Middle East, found him in bed, wrapped in the sheets, with his eyes closed. When he asked how he was feeling, his father replied: ‘Sick as a dog.’ Then, opening his eyes, he corrected himself: ‘As sick as two dogs.’

  The final days were spent arranging Mitterrand’s affairs. Apart from the houses at Latche and in the rue de Bièvre, he and Danielle had less than 250,000 francs (£30,000 or US $45,000) in the bank and nothing in stocks, an inheritance so paltry that one might have thought it would have silenced those in France who maintained that he had abused his position to salt away hidden wealth.fn1 He worried that she would not have enough to live on – unnecessarily, because, as he must have been well aware, the French State is generous to the widows of former presidents. Danielle inherited his pension and the royalties from his books. To Mazarine he bequeathed his library. She also became his literary executor. Anne had long been independent. She owned her apartment in the Latin Quarter and she had her career as a curator at the Musée d’Orsay. François left her the little house amid the olive trees at Gordes.

  There were also spiritual matters to settle.

  Two days before his death, when André Rousselet tried discreetly to enquire whether he wanted a religious service at his funeral, he answered, ‘I still have time to think about all that’. In fact he had already thought about it. In his will, drawn up at the time of his first operation, three years earlier, he had written equivocally, ‘a Mass is possible’. But what kind of Mass and where? Should he take extreme unction, as his devoutly Catholic sister, Geneviève, urged him? Did he want the government to proclaim a period of national mourning? Even as the end approached, he tried to put off the moment when he would have to commit himself.

  In the last months, Anne remembered, ‘death was a real problem for him. [It sometimes made him] very stressed. He kept asking himself questions. So many questions . . .’

  Mitterrand was an agnostic. ‘I don’t know whether I believe or I don’t believe,’ he wrote, ‘but it’s a problem which intrigues me.’ Ever since his faith had faltered as a PoW at Ziegenhain, he had, in his own words, ‘walked around the subject’. Years earlier he had written, ‘I was born a Christian and no doubt I will die one. But in between?’ In fact he was deeply ambivalent: he both believed in God and did not. ‘I have a mystical soul and a rationalist brain, and . . . I am incapable of choosing between them,’ he had told Giesbert the previous spring.

  He had been close all his life to certain clerics whose spirituality he admired and had been a regular visitor to Taizé, an ecumenical monastic community in Burgundy which preached simplicity and reconciliation. But the Catholic hierarchy was another matter. Christ had been an agitator, he had told Elie Wiesel. If He were to return today to preach in France, ‘the local bishop would contact the authorities and ask them to move Him on somewhere else.’

  On the wall of his bedroom in the rue Frédéric-Le-Play were pictures of Francis of Assisi and Thérèse of Lisieux, a young nineteenth-century nun who had become, with Joan of Arc, one of the four patron saints of France. At the beginning of December, her remains were brought in a gilded reliquary to the Church of St Francois Xavier, near the Invalides, as part of a procession across France to mark the coming centenary of her death. When the cortège left for Normandy, it made a detour to the building where Mitterrand lived so that he could stand on the pavement, resting his hands on the casket, for a few moments of meditation. It was not her sainthood that attracted him. He had once written that ‘there is more charity in the heart of Louise Michel [a social activist and heroine of the Paris Commune] than in all the Communion of Saints of the Church of Rome.’ But Francis and Thérèse were eccentric, transcendent figures. Transcendence was what Mitterrand sought from religion.

  He believed fervently in prayer. There were times when he disappeared and would be found on his knees in a village church or behind a pillar in a cathedral, lost in contemplation. But at the same time, he was sceptical. People pray when they are in trouble and forget to do so when they are happy, he told Wiesel. ‘That seems to me suspect.’ And to whom should one pray? He had no answer. When he prayed, he said, it was not because he expected to be heard. It was ‘to communicate with a transcendent world’. Marie de Hennezel had encouraged him to read the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which teaches that once the flesh is left behind the soul need have no fear. He was intrigued by the death rites of ancient Egypt. His discussions with the astrologer, Elizabeth Teissier, sought to pierce the veil which separates the here and now from what might li
e beyond.

  All his life, since the death of his grandmother when he was fourteen years old, Mitterrand had been fascinated by death as a moth is fascinated by a candle. Her last words, he told de Hennezel, had been: ‘Oh! The Light! So it was true!’ Every night, before he slept, he said, he had a thought for those who had died: his parents, his closest friends, the old Jesuit who had been his companion in the kommando at Schaala and who, paralysed and speechless after a stroke, had had ‘all the light of the world in his eyes’. Mitterrand approved the view of one of Marie de Hennezel’s patients, who felt God was the invention of man rather than the other way round but nonetheless insisted that life could not be reduced to a packet of atoms. ‘He who dies, will see,’ she had written. For himself, he said in an interview with l’Express, shortly after leaving office, ‘I am not fixated on death, but rather on the immense question mark that death represents. Is it nothingness? That’s possible. But if it is not nothingness, what an adventure!’

  The time for philosophising was drawing to a close.

  On Sunday evening, January 7 1996, when Danielle and Gilbert came to see him, Tarot told them he had left word that he did not wish to be disturbed. He had asked Tarot to say ‘those who love me will understand’. Danielle went in anyway but Mitterrand was drifting between consciousness and sleep. Gilbert thought afterwards that it was ‘partly that he did not want to be seen in such a state, but also that he wanted to confront death alone’. In fact, there was another reason of which neither of them was aware. In the early hours of Sunday morning, Mitterrand had been restless and had awakened Anne. ‘He wanted to get up,’ she said, ‘but he wasn’t supposed to because he had all kinds of tubes and things attached. So at three o’clock in the morning I telephoned Tarot. I explained to him: “I’ve told him not to [move], but he doesn’t understand what I say to him any more”. Tarot didn’t come over but I think he grasped what that meant. François had always said: “When it reaches my brain, you should finish me off. I don’t want to end in that state.” In the morning, when Tarot came, he said I could leave. I went back to the rue Jacob. I was exhausted and that night I slept there . . . That was when [Tarot] must have given him an injection to end it all. I feel I was the one who condemned him. But he absolutely rejected the idea of being incapacitated – and that I understand very well.’