His departure marks the end of an era. He is the last of the dissident generation of Central and Eastern Europe who, in their own style, tried to find a new grammar of government after four decades of sometimes brutal, always brain-deadening Communist rule.

Lech Walesa, the Solidarity strike leader who went on to become President of Poland, won barely 1 per cent of the vote in his last attempt to regain power in 2000. He now presents a fishing programme on Polish television.

Mr Havel came to power on the crest of the 1989 revolutionary wave with crowds chanting: “Havel na Hrad!” (“Havel to the Castle”). It was appropriate that a dramatist whose plays mocked the bureaucratisation of the police state should enjoy such a theatrical rise.

For 13 years after the Velvet Revolution he presided first over Czechoslovakia, then, after the anguished divorce from Slovakia, over the Czech Republic. He has, even his friends admit, grown tired in office; his people cruelly tired of him. “The world still applauds Havel for views that seem to Czechs at home to be little more than moral kitsch,” Martin Komarek, of the daily Mlada Fronta Dries, said.

The first years, the early 1990s, were the best. They were a constant improvisation. Using a child’s scooter, Mr Havel propelled himself down the castle’s long corridors. He would still drink with friends in the Golden City, nestling below the castle. He became a multiple symbol: the triumph of intellect, courage and purity of spirit over the base instincts of a people who had compromised perhaps a little too readily with their Communist rulers.

That sat awkwardly. His aim of making a kind of Athenian marketplace out of the castle, a President-led forum bouncing around ideas for the future of the republic, depended on him collecting trusted intellectuals around him as a moral counterweight to scheming party politicians.

But instead of philosophers and artists, he was ringed by overprotective and sometimes self-serving courtiers. They were, it is true, unconventional advisers, pony-tailed and contemptuous of diplomats.

The rock musician Frank Zappa, whose claim to fame was that he slid a live rat into his leather trousers, was invited round. It was supposed to radiate fun and easy governing style. For ordinary Czechs it was merely juvenile.

The word got back to the President that his old dissident friends felt excluded by the new guard. Mr Havel threw a party at the Restaurant Manes near his old flat where they used to talk about Sartre and Kierkegaard and get drunk. The President moved from table to table, exchanging small talk. By the end of the evening he was sitting in the corner chuckling with his bodyguards, unable to bridge the gap with his old friends.

By the mid-1990s it was clear that Czech politics would be defined by two opposing personalities: Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Klaus, the leader of the conservative Civic Democrats (ODS). Mr Klaus, 61, may yet succeed Mr Havel as head of state. During the Communist days Mr Klaus was a free-thinking, internationally orientated economist, but certainly no dissident.

He was convinced at an early stage that only rapid popular privatisation would propel the Czechs towards capitalism. He remains deeply suspicious about the powers of the European Commission, the influence of Brussels over everyday life; the dangers of the euro.

The President, by contrast, was uneasy about speedy under-regulated privatisation. He was committed to a European ideal, to reconciliation with Germany, to a “social” Europe. The two men were, and are, chalk and cheese.

If Mr Klaus becomes President it will be because Czechs have grown impatient with what they regard as the moral superiority of Mr Havel. They do not like homilies. Yet that is all Mr Havel, constrained by the constitution, had to offer.

His credo was that Czechs should rediscover, and live in, the language of truth. Weekly radio broadcasts, beautifully crafted, urged Czechs to be more tolerant, to make their peace with Germany, to open themselves to the world, to banish racism and provincialism. The Czechs switched off.

The quintessential Bohemian hero is Schweik, the private whose native cunning allows him to survive the disaster of a war he does not want to fight. The natural Czech response to crisis and repression, whether Habsburg, Nazi or Soviet, is to retreat into a special kind of provincialism. But Mr Havel was the anti-Schweik, urging his people to confront truths rather than dodge them. During his presidency the Czech Republic has joined Nato and will become a member of the European Union next year.

It has achieved a relatively smooth transition from Communism to capitalism and has regained its rightful position at the heart of Europe.

The Czechs, one feels sure, will become milder in their judgment of the man. He went into hospital 17 times during his presidency and his life was often in danger. On those occasions Czechs would stop their grumbling and one could sense genuine concern. Most already accept that Mr Havel was in a class of his own, a distinctive, even great, Czech in unsettled times.

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