Charlie Haughey had his Charvet shirts, Roland Dumas his £1,320 Berluti shoes. Both men were elegant and arrogant, enamoured of power, money and secrecy. And both had over-talkative former mistresses. It was Ms Christine Deviers-Joncour - Mr Dumas's companion for seven years - who brought down the prominent lawyer and former foreign minister.
Yesterday, Mr Dumas (77) announced his resignation as president of France's highest judiciary body, the Constitutional Council. The dying President Mitterrand had appointed his old friend to France's fifth highest office as one of his last official acts.
Mr Dumas claims that corruption charges against him are an attempt to destroy Mr Mitterrand's legacy; his disgrace certainly hammers the nails deeper into his coffin.
The "nine wise men" of the Constitutional Council rule on elections and the constitutionality of laws. For more than two years, while Ms Deviers-Joncour was placed under investigation and imprisoned for five months, Mr Dumas clung to his position, proclaiming his right to be presumed innocent.
In April 1998, Mr Dumas was also placed under investigation, but it was his former lover's revelations in March 1999 that forced him to take a "temporary" leave of absence from the council. His position became untenable when two judges charged him with corruption on February 18th. If he did not resign of his own free will, his fellow council members told him last week, they would force him to do so. He was destroying the credibility of the institution. Even his fellow socialists abandoned Mr Dumas.
In 1989, while serving as France's foreign minister, Mr Dumas allegedly used his influence to have Ms Deviers-Joncour hired by the state-owned oil company Elf-Acquitaine. Her sole duty at Elf was to lobby her lover, Mr Dumas, to approve an arms sale to Taiwan. Judges are not even pursuing the couple for the murky arms deal because this might enable Mr Dumas to be tried by a special jurisdiction for high-ranking officials, instead of a vulgar criminal court.
The final tab for Ms Deviers-Joncour's "salary", apartment and Elf credit card (which she used to buy Mr Dumas's Berluti shoes and nearly £33,000 in restaurant meals for the couple) came to £7.75 million. The judges who charged Mr Dumas estimate his share of the booty at £960,384. His lawyers say that Ms Deviers-Joncour spent all the money herself and that Mr Dumas didn't know where it came from.
One of the challenges awaiting him when the former couple and five others go on trial next autumn is to explain why he deposited millions of francs in cash - never declared to tax authorities - in his bank accounts during the years of Ms DeviersJoncour's "employment".
One of Ms Deviers-Joncour's three books about her affair with Mr Dumas is entitled The Whore of the Republic. Although Mr Dumas never divorced his long-suffering wife, the heiress to a French aperitif fortune, it was Ms Deviers-Joncour who accompanied him on official visits. Women who attended Quai d'Orsay receptions recall her fashion-model thinness; men noticed her legs.
For years, Mr Dumas visited Ms Deviers-Joncour's £2.04 million apartment near the foreign ministry almost daily. In fact, she claims, Elf intended the apartment for his use, not hers. Their former concierge and the maitre d'hotel who supervised lavish dinner parties on grand opera evenings are scheduled to testify at their trial. Among the many gifts Ms Deviers-Joncour bought for Mr Dumas with Elf money were antique Greek statues costing £36,000.
And yet, Mr Dumas started honourably, as a skinny resistance fighter in the second World War, forced to identify the body of his father, Georges, shot dead by the Gestapo. He was a defender of noble causes - Algerian sympathisers in France's last colonial war, the family of the "disappeared" Moroccan opposition leader, Mehdi Ben Barka, the Canard Enchaine investigative newspaper. His trial should provide the ultimate object lesson in how power corrupts.
