WHEN the cold, grey drizzle sets in for the winter, it's a good time for love stories. So the confessions of Swedish journalist Christina Forsne regarding her 14-year romance with the late President Francois Mitterrand have set off a chain reaction in the French press. Some newspapers imply that the Socialist leader, who died last January, was the father of Ms Forsne's eight-year-old son.
In a more puritanical country the president's escapades might have endangered his career. Not in France, where powerful men are expected to attract women and the kept mistress is an institution.
Mitterrand raised two sons with his wife, Danielle. During 14 years in office, he installed his second family - museum curator Anne Pingeot and their daughter Mazarine - in the Elysee. Palace. Both families attended his funeral last winter.
Now Christina Forsne's book published in Sweden on October 21st, has revealed that the French president led not a double but a triple life. She credits herself with having influenced his Middle East policy. He was "fiercely pro Israeli" when they met, she told Paris Match in an interview but under her influence came to sympathise with the Palestinians. Forsne was a frequent visitor to Mitterrand's bedroom in the Elysee. She accompanied him on official journeys and even went to the Mitterrand's country home when his wife was there. Christina Forsne said she knew about Anne Pingeot and Mazarine before Mrs Mitterrand learned of their existence.
At the end of their first meeting, a long, serious interview in 1979, Mitterrand turned to Forsne - then 31 and exactly half his age - and asked her: "Do you always talk about politics? Don't you like life?" The second question became the title of her book, which will be published in Paris this winter.
Mitterrand began pursuing Forsne two years later, during his 1981 presidential campaign. She said she hesitated. "Over time I became very attached to him... It was a strange attachment, for Francois Mitterrand needed me. But I was not dependent on him, unlike so many people in his entourage."
As bluntly pointed out by Paris Match's interviewer, Mitterrand did not look like a movie star. "Francois Mitterrand was not particularly handsome," Forsne admitted. "He was short, paunchy, with kilos to lose and not much hair... But the fascination he exerted came from something else. There was the look in his eyes, very magnetic, his personal charisma, his bearing. He was very impressive."
When she learned that Mitterrand was dying of cancer, Forsne said she wash shattered. To keep her morale up, he promised they would "travel together and have a good time" when he left office.
Yet he stood for re-election in 1988 knowing he was terminally ill. Forsne returned to Sweden in May 1995. "He didn't want me to witness his decline, and I didn't want to be in Paris when he died," she said. Christina Forsne watched his funeral on television and visited his grave later, alone.
She read the books which came out about him and wanted to set the record straight. "What I wanted to say in this book is that I knew a man whose world was simple, much simpler than what has been said. A vulnerable man, a man with weaknesses, a man who was infinitely human."
Human weakness lay at the root of another affair - a Bonnie and Clyde romance which has preoccupied southern France this month. On trial for complicity in the biggest bank robbery in French history - £17.6 million was stolen - Helene Renaux, a pretty former secretary from the accounting department of the Toulon branch of the Banque de France, said she did it all for love. Her companion, former shipyard worker and video club manager, Jean-Claude Lopiccolo, asked her for detailed information on the workings of the bank.
Renaux's bosses described her as a model employee. Neither she nor Lopiccolo had a criminal record. "When I met Lopiccolo, I was alone with my two daughters," Renaux testified. "He took all three of us. It was paradise and he was God the Father. I didn't want to lose him. I would have done anything to satisfy him." Lopiccolo said on the witness stand that he "wanted to change my image, play a role, take on another dimension. Helene and I felt like we were living out a movie." The couple have just been sentenced to 14 years in prison.
For her part, Christina Forsne says she is enjoying "a creative and tranquil existence" in the Swedish city of Goteborg. She works for Swedish television and has started a novel. But after Forsne's tome on her relationship with Mitterrand, fiction may seem an anti-climax.
