Melville House Books

In a new book being hitting bookstores in France today, author Mazarine Pingeot says “The late French President Francois Mitterrand lived for much of his 14 years in power not at the Elysee palace but at the home of his mistress and their illegitimate daughter”—none other than author Pingeot herself. According to an Agence France Presse wire report, in the book, Bouche Cousue (Sealed Lipts), Pingeot “speaks for the first time of the 19 years she spent as a state secret, unable to acknowledge her father in public but greeting him every evening at their flat in central Paris.” Now 30 and a novelist, Pingeot says Mitterrand was “an attentive father who spent more time and affection on his hidden second family than on his wife Danielle and their two sons.” But she also describes the difficulty of her situation: “Officially I did not have a father. My classmates knew nothing of my home, of my evenings and weekends and holidays. . . .” But another story sweeping France right now shows how “Mitterrand was going to extraordinary lengths to keep his daughter’s existence hidden from the public.” Twelve former police officers and aides to Mitterand are on trial for “illegal surveillance of citizens in the Mitterrand era,” and “The head of Mitterrand’s phone-tap unit, Christian Prouteau, has told the court that his primary mission was to protect Mazarine from the journalists and opposition figures who wanted to reveal her name.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.