Smash hit

The media observed similar discretion when another tragedy hit the family in 1993. A few weeks after Claude Chirac married Philippe Habert, a political analyst, he was found dead in their flat.

The official cause of death was natural causes, but much of France heard on the grapevine that he had committed suicide with a drug overdose.

The rumour machine has not stopped at the French frontier. According to longstanding gossip in Tokyo, M Chirac has an illegitimate Japanese son. This rumour, never substantiated, was fed by M Chirac’s frequent private and unpublicised visits to Japan in the 1990s.

The Chiracs have since gone more public about their family life. In his 2002 re-election campaign, M Chirac posed for magazine pictures with Martin, Claude’s son, now 8, whose father is Thierry Rey, a wrestling champion. The couple do not live together.

Mme Chirac’s interview book, in which she alluded to his extramarital affairs, was part of the election strategy. The President has also recently accepted media reporting of Anh Dao, 34, a Vietnamese woman whom the Chiracs unofficially adopted when she arrived in Paris as a refugee in 1979 at the age of 9. She lived with the Chiracs at the mayoral residence for several years and is now married with three children, all named after the Chirac family: Jacques, Laurence and Bernard.

Laurence’s illness, which Mme Chirac said had made the family “fragile”, is sometimes given as an explanation for Claude’s extraordinary closeness to her father.

Insiders say that M Chirac, who was then the Gaullist leader and a presidential hopeful, decided to groom her as an adviser in the early 1990s after she had trouble finding a job. Libération said: “Jacques Chirac, cut off from his elder daughter, a prisoner of her anorexia, decided not to let the younger daughter go away.”

Although she has often spoken of leaving for other work Claude is more than ever her father’s image-minder, a powerful figure who mixes with the media but avoids any reporting on herself.

In her television appearance, Mme Chirac appeared strained as she tried to avoid detailed answers to sharp questions from Fogiel on On Ne Peut Pas Plaire A Tout Le Monde (You Can’t Please Everybody).

She dwelt on her belief in the harm inflicted by the traditional method of treating anorexics by isolating them. The Chiracs had initially been unable even to talk on the telephone with Laurence, she said.

Patients were told that they could see their family if they ate food. “It is a brutal approach . . . a sort of blackmail by weight,” she said. By contrast the new Paris centre has a light, happy atmosphere with rooms designed to look like normal homes and accommodation for parents. Until now the problems of anorexia and bulimia have been symbolised in France not by Laurence Chirac but by Solenn Poivre d’Arvor, the late daughter of Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, a prominent television news presenter.

M Poivre d’Arvor has written books and campaigned on anorexia since Solenn committed suicide in 1995, aged 18. Mme Chirac’s new treatment centre has been named “Maison de Solenn” in her memory.

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