Writers may do penance for an unoriginal sin

Monsignor Jacques Gaillot is what the French call mediatise - which means that if you turn on the television or open a magazine, there's a good chance you'll see his impish grin.

Indeed, the left-wing bishop's notoriety was something that attracted French publishers. You had to wonder how the ubiquitous prelate found time to write 21 (yes, 21) books. The literary critic Bernard Pivot suggested he had help from the Holy Spirit.

That was before Mgr Gaillot's fall from literary grace. Things began to unravel at last month's Salon du Livre (annual book-fair), when the Catholic publisher Golias noticed that entire pages of Gaillot's The Last Temptation of the Devil, printed by France's biggest publisher, Hachette, had been cribbed, almost word for word, from its own Return of the Devil, by the Lyon academic Paul Aries.

Mgr Gaillot did not claim the devil made him do it. Instead, he divulged one of French publishing's dirty secrets. He hadn't written The Last Temptation of the Devil at all: the fault lay with his negre, he announced before taking the book off the market.

The word "negro" sounds racist in English, but in French it denotes a ghost writer, part of every publisher's vocabulary. French publishers know their star authors are too busy to write, so they often provide the negres for them.

In France, writers are so exalted that until Mgr Gaillot, none dared admit that he signed his name to another's work. Mgr Gaillot named his negre as Alain Dugrand, and said of him: "I don't understand how someone can recopy entire chapters. That is the mystery of plagiarism." Mr Dugrand fought back, telling Liberation, "the negre is rebelling and protests: enough!".

Mr Dugrand never met Mgr Gaillot, who was presumably too busy to see him. In the text he handed in, Dugrand said, he explicitly credited Paul Aries, but the text was "cut, remodelled, added on to" - and the quotation marks around Aries's work disappeared.

French publishers and copyright lawyers insist plagiarism, like extramarital sex, was always around; people just didn't talk about it. La Fontaine, Corneille, Racine, Stendhal and Balzac all drew heavily on the works of other writers, the tabloid France Soir noted in its coverage of present scandals - which Le Monde calls "an epidemic of plagiarism".

The successful young writer Marie Darrieussecq stands accused of stealing the plot for her latest novel. The former Culture Minister Jack Lang allegedly "borrowed" ideas for his biography of Francis I. Now Henri Troyat (86), a member of the Academie Francaise and the author of more than 100 books, is being sued by two historians who say he plagiarised their biography of Juliette Drouet, Victor Hugo's mistress.

That shouldn't worry the Academie too much. Two years ago, France's highest literary body gave its Grand Prix to the novelist Calixthe Beyala after she was convicted of plagiarising the works of Howard Buten and Ben Okri.

Meanwhile, another literary controversy has erupted around Mazarine Pingeot (23), the daughter of the late President Francois Mitterrand and his mistress, the museum curator, Anne Pingeot. No one accuses Mazarine of cribbing her first novel, Premier Roman, published this month. Ms Pingeot said she thought of using a pseudonym.

"But on reflection, I didn't see any reason why I shouldn't use my own name. I don't need to be ashamed of it. I don't have to hide anymore. From now on, I exist on my own merit. I am what I write." Mr Mitterrand hid the existence of his illegitimate daughter for nearly two decades, until Paris Match broke the story in 1994.

The scandal of Mazarine's novel, publishers and media who were not in on the coup say, is that a predictable tale of father-daughter friendship and love among university students should merit the front page of France's newspaper of reference, Le Monde, a cover story in the country's best-selling weekly news magazine, the Nouvel Observateur, and a prime-time hour on the leading television station, TF1.

To make matters worse, Mazarine gracelessly attacked the media which made her famous. "I suffered so much from the press," she told the Nouvel Observateur. "From all media; the paparazzi who harassed me . . . who violated me - I remember whole days when I could not go outside and took shower after shower to wash myself of this filth, of this permanent voyeurism."

Angry readers have sent a raft of letters to the publications that fawned over Mazarine's novel, and tabloids like Gala and Paris Match, which Mazarine called ". . . these ignoble papers that drag behind me like a stain" have published acid opinion pieces denouncing her hypocrisy.

Match's editorialist, Stephane Denis, reminded Mazarine that she and her boyfriend posed willingly for the magazine. "The curiosity of the French is not, Mazarine, more contemptible than their affection," Denis wrote. Did she have to enter adulthood "telling one of those big lies that seem to run in the family?" he asked.

"Throughout your childhood and adolescence, you were protected," Denis continued. "More than protected - you were pampered and respected. Raised at our expense in a State palace, you never had to queue in traffic to leave for the weekend on Friday, or to get into the [exclusive] lycee Henri IV."

To protect the secrecy surrounding his daughter, Denis noted, Mitterrand ordered the telephones of hundreds of journalists and lawyers to be tapped. And she felt "violated".

Le Monde, whose literary critic was alone in comparing Mazarine's budding talent to that of the great, late writers Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Yourcenar, sheepishly printed outraged readers' letters, giving the excuse that Mazarine has become "a public personage": like Mgr Gaillot. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before Mazarine has her own ghost writer.