This morning as I was sitting bleary-eyed at a traffic light at the bottom of Trocadero at 8h02, I saw a navy-blue limo with flashing lights on its roof cut across the intersection ahead of everyone. I looked through the rear window and saw the haughty profile of Valéry Marie René Giscard d'Estaing, looking very much like this Placide drawing of him, en plus vieux.
At 8h10 he was being interviewed live on Radio France info, which is a few minutes farther down the quai, but he didn't sound breathless.
The occasion was the appearance of the third book of his memoirs, about his period as President of France. The interviewer was snide and when Giscard said that the book recounted a conversation he had with Mitterrand in the last week of Mitterrand's life, the interviewer remarked, "At least those are the words you put into his mouth."
Giscard lost in 1981, and he ends the book with a sentence that says that the defeat gnaws at him the way the fox gnawed the belly of the little Spartan boy. One statistic from the conversation stayed with me. In 1980, the unemployment rate in France was seven percent.
When I first came to France, the real estate agent showed me an apartment that had been carved out of the "children's floor" of Giscard's hôtel particulier in the 16th. "I know it's above your budget, but if I show someone around, I get to see it!" she said. The place was for rent for 40,000 francs a month. There were three policemen standing out front when we got there. A dignified gray-haired housekeeper in a uniform showed us around a long, low-ceilinged flat with ancient 1950s carpet, a kitchen built for dwarves, but-- pièce de résistance-- a large ballroom on the ground floor, with a vast stone fireplace and a minstrel's gallery above it! The next day they called to see why we didn't take it.
My favorite story about Giscard is that when Ronald Reagan was running for president, someone asked him what he thought about Giscard d'Estaing. "Where's that?" he asked.
Isn't he an immortal now? Or am I thinking of someone else?
From Sedulia: No, he is one. I think he got Senghor's chair.
Posted by: Jennifer | 06 October 2006 at 11:14
OMG... A ballroom with a minstrel's gallery? AND you didn't take it? Wow.
I never that whole Spartan fox stomach story before. Very good image of someone keeping their emotions off the radar.
Posted by: nardac | 06 October 2006 at 12:41
Just one of France's array of spectacularly unsuccessful twentieth century politicians, he can't even stand out in that regard. Presumably following the recent debacle of the EU Constitution, over the authoring and promotion of which he presided with such comprehensively disastrous results, he now has a second rodent chewing away at his guts.
Thanks to this 'affaire' of the Constitution, Reagan's assessment of Giscard's global significance can now be said to have been prescient (as well as accurate at the time).
Posted by: ZF | 06 October 2006 at 16:25