PARIS — SHE would sneak into the Élysée Palace to see her father, the president of France, through a back door that led directly to his private apartments. On winter days, they dined together in the library, by the fireplace.
Mazarine Pingeot is the daughter of François Mitterrand and Anne Pingeot, his longtime mistress, and for much of her youth and nearly his entire 14-year presidency she was a state secret.
“When he was absent, he was the president,” said Ms. Pingeot (pronounced pan-JOH), who has her father’s intense dark eyes. “When he was home, he was for me.”
Mr. Mitterrand, who was known as the Sphinx, began his double life long before he was elected president, but the existence of his second family was revealed only near the end of his political career. Less than a year after leaving office in 1995, he died of cancer, an illness he also tried to keep secret. Anne and Mazarine Pingeot attended the state funeral along with Mr. Mitterrand’s wife, Danielle, and the Mitterrands’ two sons.
During his presidency, Mr. Mitterrand lived officially with Danielle in his home on the Rue de Bièvre, on the Left Bank. But he spent most nights with Anne Pingeot, who was a curator at the Musée d’Orsay, and Mazarine, who still uses her mother’s family name. In 1984, while president, Mr. Mitterrand legally recognized Ms. Pingeot as his daughter, but that was kept secret, too, as was the existence of his second family until near the end of his life.
Ms. Pingeot, now 37, an author and philosophy professor, lived with her mother in an apartment owned by the French state, under the protection of government bodyguards. It was not until 1994 that the story came out, when pictures of her and her father were published in the magazine Paris Match.
Last month, Ms. Pingeot published “Bon Petit Soldat,” (“Good Little Soldier”), a diary that includes memories of her childhood as a state secret. It is another attempt, she said, to “unravel” the enigmas of her past, seven years after she published “Bouche Cousue” (“Sealed Lips”).
“Being unable to share a secret makes this secret very heavy,” she said in an interview at Julliard, her publisher. “You protect it rather than protecting yourself.”
Ms. Pingeot described in her autobiographical books and in interviews how Mr. Mitterrand spent almost every night of his 14 years in office with his daughter and mistress in a secret apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris, across the river and three miles from the Élysée.
Ms. Pingeot spent her childhood surrounded by books, pets and eight bodyguards. She wrote poems and read Flaubert, Balzac and Zola because “literature goes with loneliness,” and when she got a bicycle, her bodyguards followed her on bicycles, too.
Mr. Mitterrand liked “ambivalence,” Ms. Pingeot said. It was a different age, one more protective of the private lives of high officials, and, she said, Mr. Mitterrand liked to eat with her at restaurants and stroll with her along the banks of the Seine.
BUT he was careful, too, even suspicious. He ordered his security staff to wiretap those who knew about her existence, including a journalist, Jean-Edern Hallier. He spoke of his daughter to a tiny circle of friends, said Christian Prouteau, Mr. Mitterrand’s chief of security, but sheltered his second family in houses bought with state money.
For the outside world, Ms. Pingeot was “the lovely little lie,” as she described herself in “Bouche Cousue.” She met Mr. Mitterrand’s official children several days before her father’s funeral, and discovered Jarnac, her father’s native village in southwestern France, after he died in 1996.
At home, Ms. Pingeot was the cherished only daughter, where she would joke with her father and he would act very unpresidential. “My father would hide an egg behind his back and say, ‘Look at me: I’m a hen,’ ” Ms. Pingeot said, smiling shyly.
The Saturday Profile: Mazarine Pingeot, Mitterrand Daughter, Looks Back
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The Saturday Profile: Mazarine Pingeot, Mitterrand Daughter, Looks Back
