The Chiracs rarely mention Laurence, 46, who fell ill with the eating disorder at the age of 15, and has long lived in seclusion in care in Paris after several suicide attempts.

Her existence has never been secret, and her illness is known to weigh heavily on her father, but she never appears with her parents and Claude, 42, her sister, who works as the President’s chief media manager.

Mme Chirac agreed to discuss her elder daughter — who trained as a doctor and worked for four years with the ambulance service — on a popular Sunday night show on France 3 television, as part of her campaign to raise funds for children’s hospitals. Her foundation largely financed an £18 million centre for adolescents with eating disorders and other troubles that opened in Paris yesterday.

“A mother who has failed with a child, who has not managed to nurse her back to health, always feels guilty . . . and a father too,” Mme Chirac told Marc-Olivier Fogiel, one of France’s most aggressive interviewers. Meningitis had triggered Laurence’s anorexia, she said. “These eating disorders are absolutely fearsome and poorly understood.”

She said that her husband’s celebrity had made it harder for Laurence: “Being famous makes the illness more troubling. Faced with this disorder, one rather wants to hide.”

The Chiracs had experienced the same feelings of helplessness and stigmatisation as any other parents, she said. “People look at you strangely and not always kindly.”

Mme Chirac, 71, was more direct in a little-noticed remark in a book published three years ago. Her children’s lives had been disturbed by her husband’s constant absence when he was Gaullist party leader, Prime Minister and Mayor of Paris, she said in Conversations, a book-length interview.

“The children suffered from this. Laurence, in her way, fell ill at the age of 15. Laurence has marked our lives with her illness. She is there and at the same time, she is not there.”

Laurence had grown increasingly depressive and suicidal over the years, she said. President Chirac’s way of coping with her condition was to keep silent. “He is very secretive. He does not want to talk about it.”

Laurence had been a brilliant and vivacious girl, “the portrait of her father” until she was struck with meningitis on a holiday in Corsica, she said.

The Chiracs have long suffered from the vigorous rumour mill that flourishes in the vacuum created by the French media’s discretion over the private lives of public figures. This tradition enabled the late President Mitterrand to keep Mazarine Pingeot, his illegitimate daughter, secret until she reached adulthood.

Mme Chirac said that she received thousands of letters of condolence in 1993 from people who had heard reports that Laurence had died. These came three years after the young woman had escaped the surveillance of a nurse and thrown herself out of the window of her fourth-floor flat. She survived with head injuries and a fractured pelvis and is said to use a wheelchair. Her fall was not reported, although M Chirac was Mayor of Paris and opposition leader at the time.

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