We had been warned. It would be the final, explosive showdown of the presidency. He would have all the barking, spittle-flecked appeal of Buddy, the First Dog, trapped and foaming in a corner. In the event, the only potentially explosive moment came when a huge, affectionate smile suddenly lit up the screen as he recalled how "Miss Lewinsky has a way of getting information out of people when she's either charming or determined".

"True happiness is the one offered by reminiscence," wrote the original Casanova. And here was Bill Clinton showing every sign of it. Never mind the sex and the lies. For anyone seeking an insight into Bill's behaviour, that videotape moment came dangerously close to suggesting something that probably never occurred to the sweaty, panting lawyers: that Bill actually liked Monica. Whatever next?

What came next seemed to confirm it. Not just the thoughts but the deeds, dredged up by the Grand Inquisitor's minions. There were the gifts - like the tennis bag from the Black Dog Restaurant in Martha's Vineyard: "Well . . . I knew she liked things from the Black Dog so I think that's what I put the presents in."

And there was the pin showing the New York skyline and the Rockettes blanket from New York: "She was going to New York, taking a new job, starting a new life . . . so I thought it would be a nice thing to give her."

She, he recalled, had given him "a particularly nice book for Christmas, an antique book on presidents. She knew that I collected old books and it was a very nice thing . . . " And he, on another occasion, had given her a special edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass - "the most sentimental gift he had given me", she told her inquisitors. "It meant a lot to me."

Even amid the (surprisingly few) sexual encounters in the White House, there was a surprising amount of talking and physical affection. Out of some 50 lengthy, late-night telephone conversations (placed by him, upon which her phone's display lit up POTUS - President of the United States), only a quarter involved phone sex. "We would tell jokes. We would talk about our childhoods. Talk about current events . . . " she said.

Though she thought of him as a "sexual soulmate", he also reminded her of a little boy. "There was a lot of hugging, holding hands sometimes. He always used to push the hair out of my face." To him, she was "a good young woman with a good heart and a good mind . . . She talked to me a lot about her life, her job ambitions."

She, meanwhile, got a chance to learn more about him, while hiding out around the Oval Office in November 1996 (though they never had sex in the Oval Office, she said, "it wouldn't be appropriate, you know").

"I noticed you had the new Sarah McLachlan CD. I have it too and it's wonderful. Whenever I listen to song five, I think of you . . . " The song, about the agony of frustrated love, is called Do What You Have To Do:

Deep within I'm shaken by the violence

Of existing for only you

I know I can't be with you

I do what I have to do

And I have the sense to recognise

I don't know how to let you go . . .

The romance between Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio in Titanic reminded her of him and her. In fact, everything reminded her of him and her.

She sent him cards and letters, and although he had to warn her to be careful about what she wrote, he characterised them as "sometimes just funny, even a little bit off colour, but they were funny . . . "

The first whiff of Fatal Attraction must have set in when he tried to end the relationship in May 1997 and the cards and notes continued to arrive. He tried to explain to her how difficult it was for him. So insistent were his sexual desires, he told her, that he kept a daily log of "how long he had been good". It was no use.

"I feel disposable, used and insignificant . . . I am begging you one last time please let me visit," she wrote in one letter. And in another: "I am trying to deal with so much emotionally, and I have nobody to talk to about it. PLEASE be my friend."

Now here he is, before the grand jury, apparently looking for insights into her motivation for the continued correspondence and its unfortunate slant: "Maybe because of changed circumstances in her own life, in 1997, after there was no more inappropriate contact, she sent me more things in the mail and there was a sort of a disconnect sometimes between what she was saying and the plain facts of our relationship. And I don't know what caused that, but it may have been dissatisfaction with the rest of her life . . . "You know, she had from the time I first met her talked to me about the rest of her personal life. And it may be that there is some reason for that. It may be that when I did the right thing and made it stick that, in a way, she felt a need to cling more closely or try to get closer to me . . . "

No kidding. For all their shared confidences, he had not been listening. Here was a woman who, to anyone with a working brain, had nothing to lose. A woman to whom their affair was "the most important thing in the world", who paid to join rope lines just to see him. A woman so besotted that as recently as last January she could fly into a jealous rage at a picture of the President and First Lady "being romantic on their holiday vacation".

A woman who only weeks before had been "hysterical", in her own words, after being told that he couldn't see her because he was "busy" with the elegant Eleanor Mondale. A woman in her early 20s who, in his own words, "just sort of showed up" at the gates of the most powerful man in the world, "and wanted to be let in and wanted to come in at a certain time. And she wanted everything to be that way . . . "

As all this was occurring around the time he was due to make the fateful deposition to the Paula Jones lawyers, imagine her state of mind as he jabbed that index finger in the face of the nation, not just denying their sexual relationship (which was predictable), but flicking her away as "that woman, Miss Lewinsky".

It was a startling gamble to take with a woman who he knew to be out of control. More than that, with a woman about whom he knew "that the minute there was no longer any contact . . . would talk about this. She would have to. She couldn't help it. It was . . . it was a part of her psyche."

It could only get worse. He took another insane fling of the dice in August when on national television he reduced her role in his life to a "mistake". To her, he was dismissing their affair as a "service contract" and that's when she turned.

Stinging with rejection, cornered by Starr's conditional offer of immunity, fearful even for her life and dosed with anti-depressants she may have been, but - for what it was worth - Starr had his witness.

Who's sorry now? Everyone, probably: Bill, Monica, Kenneth Starr, Linda Tripp presumably (in line for a perjury charge herself), and the hypocrites on Capitol Hill now inevitably having their own sex lives turned over for public edification.

One of the few to emerge with any credit is Catherine Davis, Monica's friend, who, in response to the latter's demented fantasies, insisted repeatedly that she should have nothing more to do with Bill: "You are worth much more than that, no matter his position, it's the same old affair bullshit."

Even the grand jurors chastised her, recalling her affair with another married man before the President. "And you turn around and do it again," said one. "You're young, you're vibrant. I can't figure out why you keep going after things that aren't obtainable . . . "

"That's a hard question to answer. There's work I need to do on myself," replied Monica, true to her Californian background. "A single young woman doesn't have an affair with a married man because she's normal . . . You'd probably have to know me better and know my whole journey . . . from birth to now to really understand it. I don't even understand it."

She still hasn't landed the lucrative book deal (what's left to write?). Bill, meanwhile, is hanging in there with his spin merchants and his "accountability group", the trio of religious ministers given the task of setting him on the moral straight and narrow.

"It breaks my heart that she was ever involved in this," he told the grand jury, with obvious feeling.

He was listening now all right, taking notice, but his tears were too late. By the end, said Monica herself with a fine flash of insight, he had been forced to take enough notice of her character to conclude that if he had known her better at the beginning, he would never have got to know her at all.

But then, there wouldn't be the memories.