PARIS — In 1,218 letters over 33 years, he wrote her in graceful prose about art and culture, political struggles and foreign dignitaries — and his passionate desire for her body. France is enthralled by the publication of a collection of letters President François Mitterrand sent to Anne Pingeot, the love of his life and the mother of their out-of-wedlock daughter, Mazarine.
The release last Thursday of that collection, “Letters to Anne” — along with a fanciful scrapbook Mr. Mitterrand kept for Ms. Pingeot from 1964 to 1970 — offer a rare glimpse into the life of a man generally seen as icy and Machiavellian, and who never left his wife even while he lived for years with Ms. Pingeot. The publication also reflects a changing France, where private lives were once held so sacred that the public learned of Mr. Mitterrand’s second family only when a French magazine broke the news two years before his death in 1996.
Sanctioned by Ms. Pingeot (Pan-JOH), 73, and Mr. Mitterrand’s three surviving children, the books read like time capsules from an era when people had emotions, not emoticons. “It’s really a book of the 20th century and not of the 21st,” said Jean-Loup Champion, who edited the books at the French publisher Gallimard.
“You can’t keep a secret now,” he added. “It’s a different world.”
The French news media was overwhelmingly positive about publishing the letters documenting the president’s long-term affair, although some on social media said that they found the books indecent.
“We knew Abelard and Eloise, Musset and Sand, Apollinaire and Lou, Miller and Nin,” wrote Le Point, a conservative weekly magazine. “Now we have to add to those legendary couples that of a head of state and an invisible woman who knew how to put him in a state.”
Some commentators noted the contrast between Mr. Mitterrand’s erudite prose and elegant deceptions and the current, seemingly more banal presidency of François Hollande. In 2014, France generally shrugged when Mr. Hollande, then in a relationship with the journalist Valérie Trierweiler, was photographed trying to disguise himself by donning a motorcycle helmet as he left the apartment of another woman, Julie Gayet.
Last week, a book of candid interviews with Mr. Hollande was released. He said that he had granted them over the past four years in a spirit of transparency; his critics said that it was vulgar to release it while still in office, with some even deploring the end of private life in France.
In contrast, Ms. Pingeot, a former curator at the Musée d’Orsay, remains discreet even in emerging from the shadows. In her only interview on the letters, to France Culture Radio, she expressed her hesitation about publishing them.
“I don’t know if I did the right thing,” she said in the interview broadcast on Monday. “Sometimes I think so, sometimes not.”
She typed up the handwritten letters herself, an emotional task. “I’m putting things in order. I’m 73 years old,” she added. “The fear that it wouldn’t be done correctly was also a motive for publishing them.”
Only a handful of Ms. Pingeot’s letters are in the collection, but a vivid portrait emerges of a woman who sought to preserve her dignity even as the other woman.
“There is a core of steel in Anne Pingeot,” said Philip Short, who interviewed her for his 2013 biography, “A Taste for Intrigue: The Multiple Lives of François Mitterrand.” “She knew what she wanted of her life and she made it against all the odds.”
She was a teenager from a conservative upper-middle-class Roman Catholic family in the provinces when she met Mr. Mitterrand, then in his mid-40s and married with two children, an occasional golf partner of her father. For the first two years of their correspondence, 1962 and 1963, Mr. Mitterrand uses the formal “vous” form of address, and Ms. Pingeot is reluctant. Then the physical romance blossoms.
France’s longest-serving president, from 1981 to 1995, Mr. Mitterrand began his political career on the Catholic right, and worked for the Vichy government, which collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, but then shifted leftward and joined the Resistance. He later led the Socialist party in France, uniting the discordant factions of the French left, and helped build the European Union.
Some letters read as if they were written as diaries for the historical record as much as for Ms. Pingeot. But most are intimate and tender. “Everything trembles in you like a forest in the wind,” he wrote her in 1972. “But the forest has a thousand roots and the wind blows through it. You are my forest, in which I love each tree.”
In a 1971 letter, he likens their love to “a deep wave.” “It separates us and I cry out, I cry out, and you hear me through the rush of sound, you love me, I am desperately yours, but then you don’t see me anymore, I don’t know where you are, and I am filled with all the unhappiness in the world.”
The letters are revelatory, said Régis Le Sommier, deputy editor of Paris Match, the weekly magazine that broke the story of Mr. Mitterrand’s second family in 1994. “We knew he was a good writer, a very, very talented man, very skilled in writing,” he said. “But the level of writing he uses to declare his flame to Anne Pingeot is amazing.”
In one of the collection’s few letters by Ms. Pingeot, from 1971, she asks Mr. Mitterrand to regularize their situation, even if he won’t leave his wife. “If ‘free love’ deprives me of a home, a child, hope, calm, security, dignity, it should at least … stay free,” she wrote. “There will always be a speech, an election or a party congress. I am tired, and live every day with anxiety. If you love me, you have to try to make me happy.”
Their daughter, Mazarine, was born in 1974 and named after Cardinal Mazarin, the first minister of Louis XIV and a tactician Mr. Mitterrand admired. After Mr. Mitterrand became president in 1981, Ms. Pingeot and Mazarine were given round-the-clock security protection, at the expense of the state. Mr. Mitterrand would come home to stay with them at night. He used his security detail to prevent journalists from revealing the secret.
The president’s relationship with Danielle Gouze, whom he married in 1944, was complex. For years, Mrs. Mitterrand also had a partner, Jean Balenci, who had his own room in the Mitterrand family apartment in Paris. He and Mr. Mitterrand would sometimes breakfast together and he spent holidays with the Mitterrand family. “To outsiders he was introduced as a distant cousin,” Mr. Short writes in his biography.
To publish the letters and journal, Mazarine Pingeot and Jean-Christophe and Gilbert Mitterrand, Mr. Mitterrand’s sons with Mrs. Mitterrand, signed the contract with Gallimard, and they will receive the advance and profits from the books’ sales, Mr. Champion said. The two families met for the first time at Mr. Mitterrand’s funeral in January 1996.
“Letters to Anne” ends in September 1995, when the president is dying of prostate cancer, which he had had since the early ’80s — for years keeping that, too, a secret from the public. “You always gave me more,” Mr. Mitterrand wrote in his last letter to Ms. Pingeot. “You were my chance of life. How could I not have loved you more?”
Daphné Anglès contributed reporting.
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