To Jarnac in search of François Mitterand’s final resting place

It was late evening on day three of a cruising trip down the River Charente. The sun had finally come out as we passed through the last lock and entered the town of Jarnac. Like a welcoming beacon,

orange light reflects off the water and the huge glass-fronted headquarters of Courvoisier Cognac overlooks the river.

The River Charente virtually flows with brandy and there’s a multitude of brandy companies but as I leafed through my guide book, I read that Jarnac was also the place where the late president François Mitterand was born, lived most of his life and was buried.

Mitterand was seemingly great pals with our own leader Charles Haughey. He was France's first president to be elected from the Socialist party and the country's longest-serving head of state (14 years).

First impressions of Jarnac, in south-west France, above the city of Bordeaux, that evening were somewhat sleepy. The various old cognac warehouses and the solid, slightly grandiose sandstone buildings in the town speak of a place where once untold amounts of cash flowed. It's not that it looks run-down in any way today – just a little like a radiant beauty tired after a succession of long parties.

With my crew of wife and three able-bodied teenagers to assist, we moored up for the night.

The next day was like an Irish morning in spring. As I sat on deck eating breakfast with my woolly hat on, I noticed that we had tied up at Quai François Mitterand. There was also a stone plaque with some quotation from the president about the beguiling beauty of Jarnac and the River Charente. Half of it was worn or scratched away.

I got on my bike, left my crew behind and cycled to the highly helpful tourist office, where they showered me with printed information and maps. As luck would have it, both the Mitterand family home and the Musée François Mitterand were closed, but the town cemetery was open.

Mitterand died slowly and surely of prostate cancer; something which left him in a position to be able to plan his funeral arrangements in minute detail.

He made his peace with his wife and mistress and managed to conceal his terminal condition from the country and the rest of the world up until it was time to say goodbye to the nation. He also organised a final meal with his nearest and dearest some days before his death in 1996.

I had some trouble with the printed map (another lost skill in this digital age), so I got off the bike and walked along the quayside. It was approaching lunchtime but still an unseasonably cool day, with rain spitting every now and again from the low-lying clouds.

I stopped to check directions with two elderly locals. They looked like something straight out of a photo-shoot of France in the 1950s. One of them had a beret; the other one was smoking a pipe as they sat on a bench under a plane tree.

I asked them if I was near the cemetery where the former president François Mitterand was buried. They told me that it was a few blocks away – turn left just after another Cognac company’s warehouse, straight ahead and then you can’t miss it. All of his family were gone from his beloved Jarnac now, they told me.

“So there are no more socialists left in Jarnac, then?” I asked. They only laughed in response.

There weren’t too many people about so I had the cemetery pretty much all to myself. As the sun started to emerge, I wandered through the large walled burial ground. All the more ordinary graves occupied about half of the total territory, with some of the older and more imposing ones off to the left.

I wheeled my bike around trying to guess what Mitterand’s final resting place would look like. To my surprise, the Mitterand family plot was not the huge palatial structure I had imagined. Instead, it was a very modest family tomb – not of the “walk-in” mourning-castle variety that some families had erected. Only for a helpful little standard sign and French flag, I could have been searching for it all day.

And that was it. The sun began to warm up the air and Jarnac started coming to life. I left the cemetery and zig-zagged on my bike through the pretty streets, past a square where I found another monument to Mitterand in the form of a bronze bust, through the huge central Place du Château and then back down to the boat by the quayside.

“You were gone a long time,” my 14-year-old son said. “Where were you?”

“I was visiting François Mitterand’s grave.”

“Who?”

“He was a French president and he’s buried in this town”

“Was he a good guy?”

"Well, he certainly wasn't perfect, but any friend of Ireland is a friend of mine."

HOW TO . . .  JARNAC
Get there: We took the slow route with Nicols boat hire (nicols.com), having come by ferry with Brittany Ferries (brittanyferries.ie.). The nearest airport is Bordeaux-Mérignac, which is an hours' drive, with a direct connection from Dublin (aerlingus.com) until the end of October.
See also: jarnac-tourisme.fr