When British prime minister Tony Blair, no fan of the French president, was asked at the weekend to rate Jacques Chirac's performance at what will have been his last formal EU summit, Mr Blair was briefly at a loss for words. Then he came up with "presidential". It was not exactly a compliment, and everyone knew what his euphemism meant.
Even at gatherings of heads of state and government, Mr Chirac never behaves as if he is in the company of equals. La Francehas to be seen to be a leader, not one of the pack, and any affront to French honour or interest, or even language, was likely to be met with Chiracian grandstanding - he walked out of a summit a year ago when the French head of the EU employers' group addressed the meeting in "the language of business", English.
Mr Chirac's swashbuckling, some say Quixotic, approach, however exasperating to many European partners, seems somehow appropriate to a former cavalry officer nicknamed by Georges Pompidou " le bulldozer". His political career, spanning 40 years and involving service as a junior minister as far back as 1967 under Charles de Gaulle, has been a remarkable rollercoaster, culminating, after two unsuccessful attempts, in election twice to the presidency. And he surely would have tried for a further term had his party ally, once apprentice, but now bitter rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, not suckered him into running a disastrous referendum on the EU constitutional treaty in May 2005. Over the weekend, with typical hyperbole, he announced his impending retirement.
Domestically he has straddled populism and nationalism, embraced traditional values, and flirted with illegality (on party financing). And the farmers - Irish as well as French - had no better friend. Critics would say he was a master at being elected, but not at governing - having baulked at the reform of the rigidities of French social policy, he presided inconsistently over a sluggish state-dominated economy and an increasingly ethnically divided society.
Internationally, Mr Chirac has been a firm friend of the EU, despite the referendum debacle and although it can be argued that France wants a strong Europe with weak institutions that will not undermine its claim to continue to act as a world power. That perspective, combined with a traditional French anti-Atlanticism, contributed to his willingness to stand, often abrasively, against the US adventure in Iraq and to maintain France's force de frappe, its independent nuclear deterrent.
Indeed, just a year ago Chirac enlisted France in the select rank of nations that not only possess nuclear weapons but have said they are prepared to use them both pre-emptively and against non-nuclear targets. No wimp, he.
In truth, the departure of the genial old rogue from the world stage in May will leave it a more anodyne and predictable place, no matter who the French replace him with. They don't make them like Mr Chirac any more.