With that special talent of First Ladies, Bernadette Chirac and Hillary Clinton walked into the Council Chamber at Tulle, the seat of the Correze Department, without a wrinkle in their designer suits and not a blond hair unstuck. Hillary beamed a frozen, jet-lagged smile on the 37 county councillors and sat down to, in the words of the White House, watch "rural grass-roots democracy in action". French democracy is mostly about speeches and equal time, so two local Gaullists, a Socialist and a Communist all spoke before Mrs Clinton.
Two years ago, at the Lyon G7 summit, Mrs Chirac invited Mrs Clinton to visit Correze, the Arkansas of France and the home of Mr Chirac's family before they moved to Paris. It was here, in this hilly, poor, landlocked region, that President Chirac started his political career by standing for parliament three decades ago. His wife followed on a much smaller scale. "I was trained by Jacques Chirac," she said recently. "I was very young when I started here, at his side." Mrs Chirac has served as a town councillor for Sarran (population 275) since 1971, and a departmental councillor since 1979. She visits Correze every week.
The two women had a lot to commiserate about during their drive in Hillary's armoured Cadillac limousine. Both married flamboyant, capricious and ambitious bons vivants from a lower social class than their own. Mrs Chirac was born in the aristocratic, devoutly Catholic Chodron de Courcel family. Like Hillary Clinton, she met her husband in a university library. But while Mrs Clinton completed her studies at Yale and went on to become a successful lawyer, Mrs Chirac dropped out of the Institut des Sciences Politiques to type her husband's university papers.
She often describes herself as a vehicle pulled by her husband's "engine". It cannot be very gratifying for all of France to know that Jacques calls her by the nickname "turtle".
For the sake of their husbands, both women adapted to backward rural regions that contrasted with the city life they were used to. Both stood by their husbands through hard times. The French press never mention the Chiracs' eldest daughter, Laurence, who attempted suicide years ago and is still hospitalised. Their younger daughter, Claude, is a close adviser to her father and escaped criticism when she bore a son out of wedlock during the 1995 presidential campaign. In the meantime, Hillary Clinton has testified six times in connection with the collapse of the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan in Arkansas, which her law firm represented. Not to mention Gennifer, Paula, Kathleen and Monica . . . At 64, Mrs Chirac is 14 years older than her American guest, and could offer a few words of advice on that subject, too. Mrs Clinton perhaps wishes she was first lady of France, where the love affairs of politicians are not considered news.
Bernadette and Hillary share the same preoccupations with healthcare (Bernadette is the president of the French Hospitals Foundation) and children. Yesterday's tour of Correze included the obligatory stop at a nursery school, and today, Mrs Chirac will accompany Mrs Clinton to a Senate round table on - you guessed it - child care and women's issues.
Hillary Clinton was not always a docile political wife in the mould of Bernadette Chirac. But her plan to reform US healthcare was rejected by Congress early in the Clinton administration, and after disastrous mid-term elections the project was abandoned. Mrs Clinton's public relations team softened her image, and she wrote a book about raising children, It Takes a Village.
FROM time to time the old Hillary sneaks out - for example last week, when the First Lady called for a Palestinian state during a satellite hook-up with Arab and Israeli young people in Geneva. In Correze, a US embassy official sourly told journalists that they would not be allowed to ask Mrs Clinton any questions, and the chief concern of the Secret Service agents hovering around her seemed to be to keep the press at a safe distance.
When Mrs Clinton meets Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's wife for breakfast in Paris this morning she might feel a little nostalgic for the old Hillary. Sylviane Agacinski has not only kept her maiden name and her career as a philosophy professor, she is not afraid of expressing her feminist views, which she recently explained in a best-selling book, Half of the Men in the World are Women.
But questions of gender and power do not seem to interest the residents of Correze. A few old people watched the Cadillac cavalcade from their windows, and a group formed on the main square of Correze village, where Mrs Clinton lunched with the mayors of nine nearby towns.
"Whatever it's for, people are never overwhelmingly enthusiastic," a policeman said as he watched the First Lady. "You might say it's in our character - people are calm here."
