FRANCE: Lara Marlowe joins President Chirac's wife, Bernadette, as she canvasses voters
It was the beginning of a 12-hour day on the campaign trail, and the First Lady walked straight into the most explosive issue in French politics. At a government-sponsored home - catering for 150 mentally handicapped and unemployed people, alcoholics and asylum-seekers - Bernadette Chirac found herself face to face with a dark-haired woman holding a baby. "Do you speak French?" Mrs Chirac asked several times.
The Turkish woman smiled radiantly but did not answer. "Is this your only baby?" Mrs Chirac kept trying. No, the director of the home said, she has four. Was there a husband? A man stepped forward, also smiling, but without a word of French.
"How did they get here?" the unflappable Mrs Chirac continued. The welfare department had brought them, the director said, evading the more obvious question of immigrant traffickers and leaking tubs in the Mediterranean. Were they taking French classes? Mrs Chirac asked, seeking some saving grace in this distillation of many a French person's nightmare.
Mrs Chirac's second encounter was slightly more satisfying. At least Awatif Benabdel, a 25-year-old baker's wife from Algeria, spoke French. She bounced her five-month-old daughter Ikram on her hip, her husband, Salim, beside her. The couple arrived on tourist visas in September 2000. "We've applied for asylum but we haven't received an answer," Mrs Benabdel complained.
"Do you have a job?" Mrs Chirac asked. "We aren't allowed to work," the Algerian immigrant replied. Mrs Chirac was then shown the couple's tidy little room with two cupboards, two beds, a cot and a wash basin. "It's quite spacious," she commented.
Mrs Chirac had flown to eastern France to support Nadine Morano, the local candidate of the Union for the Presidential Majority (UMP) in tomorrow's legislative election. Mrs Morano and her husband Angelo are the grandchildren of Italian immigrants, but her campaign programme addresses itself to voters "who can no longer bear the explosion in immigration" which she blames on a law passed by the outgoing left-wing government. Asylum applications rose 22 per cent last year alone, Mrs Morano says. "That means 47,291 extra asylum-seekers whom we cannot receive in a decent manner".
Mrs Chirac was not about to make inflammatory statements about immigration. It's not her style, and exploitation of the issue by the extreme right-wing National Front has made most mainstream politicians reluctant to address it.
But you can imagine the First Lady reporting back to her husband. ("Why Jacques, they didn't even know how to say, 'bonjour'!"). For Bernadette Chirac, who turned 68 last month, has carved out a role for herself as her husband's ears and eyes on the ground - and his most effective campaigner. Since the presidential campaign started in February, she has been almost constantly on the road. "I have a rage and a fury to win," she told me in the plane back to Paris that evening. "I hate losing. This is the last stretch - the next two Sundays."
All day, Mrs Chirac pleaded with "the little people" of Meurthe-et-Moselle for a "clear and overwhelming majority" for her husband in the National Assembly. "I support Madame Morano with all my heart," she kept saying.
For the legislative election, the President has made only two campaign appearances - a rally in Chateauroux and one 15-minute television interview. With missionary-like stoicism, his wife has travelled to 20 French cities to support Mr Chirac's supporters. Her fatigue is beginning to show. She rarely smiles. "She looks so tired," I heard onlookers saying.
After decades of benign neglect by an inattentive husband - recounted in her best-selling book Conversation - the First Lady's success must have the sweet taste of revenge over Mr Juppé and Mr Villepin, her betes noires among her husband's advisers; and over her daughter Claude, the president's communications adviser ("My daughter doesn't listen to me," Mrs Chirac told me in connection with the education of her six-year-old grandson Martin).
Mrs Chirac has been an elected official in her husband's home region of Corrèze since 1978, but until last year, her political acumen was recognised by few other than her friend, Senator Hillary Clinton. Now she has taken credit for "discovering" the popular Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and for having been the only person to predict that the extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen would face Mr Chirac in the second round of the presidential election.
When he was discreetly inaugurated for his second term last month, Mr Chirac acknowledged his debt to Bernadette with an unprecedented kiss on the cheek, in front of the television cameras. In Lorraine, Mrs Chirac shows her mettle by visiting Neuves-Maisons, a communist and socialist enclave within the constituency coveted by Mrs Morano. For more than an hour, she works the shops around the Place du 10 Mai 1981, named after the late socialist President Francois Mitterrand's victory.
"The mood on the left is rotten," Marc Colin, a Green and the deputy mayor, admits as we stand in the rain on the little square. He has resigned himself to a centre-right victory. But neither he nor the mayor would greet Mrs Chirac. "It might be misinterpreted," he explains. "And besides, Nicole Feidt is my buddy." Mrs Feidt (68) is the outgoing socialist deputy whose seat is threatened by Mrs Chirac's protegeé, Mrs Morano (38). The centre-right blame Mrs Feidt for the new rubbish collection system, which forces residents to take all but household litter to a fee-paying dump.
When she was elected mayor of Toul last year, the socialist deputy stopped renovation of the town's ramparts, built by Louis XIV's military engineer Vauban in the 17th century, and sold off a toy collection destined for a local museum.
But Mrs Morano has centred her campaign on one national issue: "refusing the immobility of cohabitation" by giving Mr Chirac a majority. The constituency in eastern France typifies voters' indecision; every five years the district flip-flops, sending first the right, then the left, then the right, to the National Assembly. In theory, it's the right's turn, but the presence of 11 candidates on tomorrow's ballot makes everything uncertain. And Mrs Morano's chances aren't helped by competition from a renegade candidate from the centre-right UDF.
Mrs Chirac's tall bodyguard blocks doorways of the shops where the First Lady listens with infinite patience to the grievances of newspaper vendors, pastry-makers and clothing sales ladies. She doesn't want anyone to come between her and the people - especially not the press, whom she distrusts intensely. "She wins people's confidence," Mrs Chirac's closest aide Bernard Niquet says. "They tell her their misfortunes. She talks to them like a big sister, like a mother. It's so rare that politicians listen to people."
Poor Bernadette, I can't help thinking, in an afternoon meeting with the wine-growers of Bruley, population 600.
Mrs Chirac's strict, aristocratic upbringing taught her never to complain - a quality not shared by her compatriots. All France, it seems, wants to tell her its problems.
In Neuves-Maisons, she got an earful about parking and sluggish cash flows. Now Mr Laroppe of the wine-growers' syndicate wants her to speed up some legislation in time for the harvest. "We don't know where it's blocked; perhaps in the agriculture ministry. For us, it's urgent."
And could she do something about the Hungarian and Romanian wine-growers who are planting thousands of hectares so they can receive more subsidies when they join the EU? Could she improve working conditions in the vineyards, and rein in the anti-alcohol lobby? "They have to stop rapping us on the knuckles," Mr Laroppe continues. "No one has ever crawled out of a wine cellar in Bruley on all fours."
It is after 8 p.m. when Mrs Chirac arrives back at Orly airport. I'm surprised to see her on a cheapcommercial flight, I tell her. "How else would I travel?" she asks. But Laura Bush flies around on a government jet . . . "Ah, but the US is a big, powerful country!" Mrs Chirac says. I assume the limousine waiting on the tarmac is for her.
But no, a longtime associate of her husband, a former Cabinet minister who is under investigation in a financial scandal, climbs into the back seat. "That's funny," Mrs Chirac says, but she isn't laughing. Then she walks through the airport like an ordinary citizen, with only the tall bodyguard and Mr Niquet at her side. The First Lady has understood the dissatisfaction of French voters, the anger with politicians living high on the hog. Will the male politicians ever comprehend it?