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Love child reveals all
 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 Mazarine Pingeot, according to her new book of memoirs. In Bouche Cousue (Sealed Lips) - to be published on Monday - 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 a 30 year-old novelist and lecturer, Pingeot paints a picture of an attentive father who spent more time and affection on his hidden second family than on his wife Danielle.But she also writes with anguish of her relationship with a man she could never openly call "Papa". "Officially I did not have a father. My classmates knew nothing of my home, of my evenings and weekends and holidays ... The pact of silence was more than a family affair. Apparently everyone was signed up to it," she writes in extracts published in Le Nouvel Observateur magazine. The world only became aware of Pingeot in 1994 when Paris-Match magazine published a now famous photograph of her emerging with her father from a Paris restaurant. The first time the French got a full view of her was at her father's televised funeral two years later. Posted by: Fred 2005-02-26 |
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