The last time I saw Bernadette Chirac, the French first lady was standing on the threshold of the Elysee Palace on Bastille Day. Several thousand people funnelled towards the plate-glass doors where Mrs Chirac stood like a lonely sentinel, shaking the hand of every guest at the annual garden party.
Her right hand must have been bruised to the bone, and when my turn came to express good wishes, the look of martyrdom in her eyes did not flicker, the pinched smile remained frozen. Meanwhile, her husband Jacques was doing the fun job, pontificating on national television about the future of France.
Bertrand Meyer-Stabley, a columnist for Elle magazine and the author of a dozen books on European royalty and political personalities, has just published the first biography of Bernadette Chirac.
He searched out the first lady's childhood friends in Poilly-lez-Gien, where Bernadette Chodron de Courcel's family owned the Gien porcelain factory, and where she spent part of the second World War in their castle. Lucien Villoing, now the mayor of Poilly, remembers Bernadette as "a little too well-bred, not wanting to get her white socks dirty". He, Bernadette and her cousins played on the chateau grounds, but he was not allowed to enter the great house. Reading the anecdote, I realised how painful it must be for a daughter of Baron Chodron de Courcel to usher riff-raff into the Elysee every July 14th.
When he began the Bernadette biography, Meyer-Stabley told me, he found her a cold and unsympathetic character. "But when I went through her whole life, I came to appreciate her qualities. She never complains. She has a very strong constitution. She has always been there to support her husband through two presidential campaigns, and she's ready for a third. Through thick, and thin, she never gave up." Bernadette Chirac has been hardened by a hard life, he concluded, but she is less frumpy and grumpy than she appears.
One thing is certain: they don't make political wives like Bernadette Chirac any more. She has subordinated her own will so totally to her husband's that Meyer-Stabley snidely refers to President Chirac as Bernadette's "lord and master". The couple met at Sciences Politiques in 1951, when the tall, garrulous Jacques asked the quiet, studious blonde to join his study group. "What impressed me," Mrs Chirac said later, "was the way he took what was worthwhile from my work . . . I lent him my notes, yet he always got better marks than me!"
When they married in 1956, Jacques Chirac asked Bernadette to devote herself to his career, to their household and children. It would be "unimaginable today", she says, for an aspiring politician to make such demands. She married the boy from a middle-class family in Correze against her parents' wishes, believing he would pursue a career as a civil servant. She was aghast when he moved into party politics - a profession she considered common and vulgar, and which kept him away from home much of the time.
Mrs Chirac's biography is both a study of the last self-sacrificing political wife and reconfirmation that politicians make monstrous husbands and fathers. "My father discovered I existed when I was 14 or 15 years old," his younger daughter Claude, now 37, has said. "I don't remember ever spending a whole Sunday with him." In a brief rebellion in the early 1970s, Mrs Chirac enrolled at the Sorbonne under her maiden name and earned a bachelor's degree in archaeology - against her husband's wishes.
Mrs Chirac's biographer describes the French president as a selfish "cannibal", gregarious on the hustings but almost never showing his wife affection. "Life is full of things that make your heart ache," she often says, quoting Madame de Sevigne. The couple have known repeated tragedies. Their eldest daughter, Laurence, now 41, attempted suicide by jumping out of a window in 1990 and is under permanent medical supervision. The husband of their younger daughter, Claude, was found dead in mysterious circumstances three years later.
The relationship between Claude - who is the president's public relations adviser - and her mother is difficult. "She is incredibly nasty to her mother - odious," Meyer-Stabley says. "It can't be easy for Bernadette to always have her daughter on official journeys, criticising her all the time." Yet Mrs Chirac says the birth of her only grandchild, Claude's son Martin, in 1996, was one of the greatest joys of her life. A doting grandmother, she is rumoured to have enrolled Martin at Eton, where her own father, Jean Chodron de Courcel, was educated.
IN the 1970s, when her husband was rapidly promoted by President Pompidou, Mrs Chirac was taken under the wing of the former first lady, Yvonne de Gaulle, and the then first lady Claude Pompidou - after whom she named her daughter. The traditionalist Madame de Gaulle - known to all as "Tante Yvonne" - took it upon herself to ruin the careers of ministers who divorced. Sources close to the Chiracs say Bernadette, a practising Catholic, shuns the second wives of her husband's divorced associates Alain Juppe and Nicolas Sarkozy. Last year, the French left called Mrs Chirac a "reactionary" when she spoke out against a draft law that would recognise unions between homosexuals. This defence of "family values" was a rare outburst from the first lady, who usually devotes herself to worthy charities. Opinion polls show she is highly regarded. "The French see her as a sort of super social worker," Meyer-Stabley explains.
Sylviane Agacinski, the wife of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, could well succeed Bernadette Chirac as the mistress of the Elysee Palace. Mrs Jospin, a university philosophy professor, resembles the new generation of political wives who have careers of their own - like Cherie Blair, a lawyer, or Doris Schroder, a journalist. Mrs Chirac has no particular affinity for these younger European first ladies, but she professes unbounded admiration for Hillary Clinton, whom she first met at an international women's conference in Beijing in the mid-1990s. Bernadette speaks English well, and corresponds with the American first lady. In May 1998, Mrs Clinton accepted Mrs Chirac's invitation to visit Correze, where she has been a regional councillor for the past two decades. For a whole day, a beaming Bernadette introduced Hillary to the charms of Correzian democracy, arts and crafts and cuisine.
Bernadette Chirac, one suspects, would like to be Hillary Clinton. "She is so strong, so intelligent, so methodical," Mrs Chirac gushed in an interview with Le Monde this month. "And she has such self control. Look at her face - it's open, radiant. She never shows what she's feeling. Her senatorial campaign in New York will be exciting. People will attack her, but she knows how to defend herself - unlike me." Mrs Chirac delivered an astute analysis of the New York poll as explained to her by Hillary, whom she describes as "a flag bearer". There was just a hint of envy when the French first lady concluded: "She will show the world what a woman is capable of doing in the year 2000. No woman can remain indifferent to her struggle."
