20
PARTISAN REVIEW
emblematic places to which Mitterrand had the habit of journeying each
year. There were also vignettes of his cronies and courtiers, some of whom
- including the prime minister, Beregovoy, a suicide - had died under
scandalous circumstances; of his wife Danielle and his former mistress, a
state museum employee, and their daughter, Mazarine, whose existence
had been revealed in recent years as part of his professed desire to make
his life an Open Book. And for public affairs addicts like myself (myoid
professional deformation returning) all this was interspersed with endless
recapitulations of his long march to power through more than fifty years
of French history in the course of which he had boxed the political com–
pass, from Far Right to Far Left and back to the middle, and finally (in the
last two years of his reign) withdrawn from politics and government for
all practical purposes, and devoted himself to dying, as it were, in public -
regretful but resigned, disclosing in small increments (artfully, like a wri ter,
although the story sometimes escaped him) the shadowy side of his pri–
vate life and his past, as if he already belonged to the ages; his face
increasingly diaphanous and handsome, almost transparent at the end,
which he awaited with something like the wry and skeptical stoicism of
his fellow-southwesterner, Michel de Montaigne.
In his career and in his culture,
Fran~ois
Mitterrand was - at once lit–
erally and in the Emersonian sense - a Representative Man; and this ,
presumably, was what the French wanted at the moment, so that the media
and the government (with nay-sayers embarrassed temporarily into silence
by the
de mortibus
taboo) made of his Death and Transfiguration a specta–
cle unlike anything I have ever seen in this country - and I've spent quite
a lot of my life here, remember, since World War II.
January
26, 1996
Mitterrand, still, on my mind.
The public to-do is abating, although there is a flap over an instant
book published by one Dr. Gubler, formerly his physician, who claims that
the nature and inevitable end of the President's illness was known as early
as 1981, and kept from the public in deliberate contradiction to the
declared policy of total openness on this subject - a matter of concern for
the French ever since they found out that another recent president,
Pompidou, spent his last months in a terminal coma without anyone out–
side his wife and inner circle knowing about it. Was it Mme. Pompidou,
at that time, who had her finger on the nuclear trigger? ...
Mystere.
The Gubler book is not available, except on the Internet, the first
print-run having been sold out on the first day and any further printing
banned by court-order, on the grounds that the book is in violation of the
secret professionel,
i.e. the confidentiality to which a doctor's patient is sup-
