THREE months away from the end of Jacques Chirac’s presidency, the ramparts of privacy shielding his family from the public eye are beginning to crumble amid revelations about the troubled lives of his daughters.

Behind her public persona as the leader’s most trusted adviser, Claude Chirac, 45, his younger daughter, has led a jetsetter’s life of love affairs with actors and sportsmen even while haunted by tragedies such as the suicide of a husband, according to two books published in Paris last week.

The greatest shadow over the family, however, has been the suffering of Laurence, 48, Chirac’s elder daughter, who has tried to kill herself several times.

A dominant figure in French politics for more than four decades, the 74-year-old Chirac has zealously guarded his family’s privacy through numerous domestic crises but, as he prepares to leave office, the barrier protecting his personal affairs appears to have fallen.

Just as François Mitterrand revealed, before he left office in 1995, that he had an illegitimate daughter with his mistress, Chirac last week acknowledged having extramarital affairs and called the mental illness of Laurence “the drama of my life”.

Nothing, however, exposed the tortured dynamics of France’s first family as graphically as the story of Claude, a single mother who became Chirac’s closest accomplice.

According to sources close to the family, her extraordinary influence over the leader is deeply resented by Bernadette, the president’s wife, and is linked to Chirac’s feelings of guilt about being an absent father during his quest for executive power.

Laurence’s severe anorexia put paid to a promising medical career for which she had worked hard in her teens. With a taste for cigarettes and alcohol, the less studious Claude showed a rebellious streak, prompting Chirac to order his chauffeur to “keep an eye on her”, according to a book about her by journalist Renaud Revel.

Her parents watched a series of boyfriends troop through the Paris town hall where the family lived in a palatial apartment for many years when Chirac was mayor. For several months she had a relationship with Patrick Abada, a pole vaulter. However, the aristocratic Bernadette was determined that Claude should marry into European royalty — topping her list was Prince Albert of Monaco — or a captain of industry.

This prompted bitter rows including one that ended when a tearful Claude got out of the car at a red traffic light, shouting: “You and papa want to sell me.”

Instead of marrying Albert, she befriended Princess Steph-anie, his sister, the “wild child” of the centuries-old Grimaldi clan, and for a while they were the life and soul of glittering allnight parties in Los Angeles that often ended up at a nightclub owned by Jack Nicholson.

Friendly with Anthony Delon and Paul Belmondo, the sons of famous French actors, Claude dated Christophe Lambert, the dashing star of the film Grey-stoke. She was also friendly with Gerard Dépardieu, who was once photographed nibbling her neck, and had a liaison with Nicolas Sarkozy, who whisked her off to London for the weekend on a friend’s private jet when he was deputy mayor of Neuilly.

Sarkozy, the interior minister, has been at loggerheads with the president ever since he backed a rival of Chirac in the 1995 presidential election. This betrayal was made all the more bitter for ending the president’s dream of Sarkozy one day becoming a son-in-law as well as political heir.

“To think that I’ve seen him in his underpants,” Chirac was reported to have commented after hearing about Sarkozy’s “treachery”. Bernadette was just as upset. “That boy is the only one to have known the family sheets,” she once told a friend, referring to the fact that Claude had entertained her friend in a private flat belonging to the family instead of in the official residence.

Claude, apparently, has never forgiven the betrayal and likes verbally eviscerating the front-runner in the race to succeed her father.

Claude may also regret her relationship with Philippe Habert, a political journalist. The two were married in a ceremony attended by various celebrity friends of Claude.

From the beginning, it did not seem that promising a match. The first thing Habert told Chirac on being introduced to him was: “1988 was a fiasco, you were lousy.” This was a reference to Chirac’s second, failed presidential campaign.

In April 1993 Habert was found dead. Claude had been planning to divorce him and he took a drug overdose after watching the video of their wedding. A year later, Claude began seeing Thierry Rey, the former judo world champion, and in 1996 she gave birth to Martin, the president’s only grandchild. Chirac was thrilled.

However, Claude and Rey separated and she dedicated more and more time to her father, becoming his most important adviser. She addresses him as “Chirac” instead of “papa” and has, on occasion, been overheard scolding him as though he were a badly behaved child.

Chirac’s wife has paid a terrible price, cruelly sidelined by Claude, who believed that her mother’s old-fashioned mores were alienating young voters.

This was not Bernadette’s only humiliation. Chirac has always had a reputation as a ladies’ man and in The Stranger at the Elysée, another biography published last week, he admitted that he had loved women other than his wife. Even so, he seemed to deny persistent ru-mours that he had fathered an illegitimate child in Japan.

He made clear that he had long been tormented by the condition of Laurence, an “intelligent and pretty” girl, he said, who had been hit by anorexia at the age of 15. When she fell ill, he had lunch with her each day hoping to make up for his absence when she was a small child. It did not work.

In 1990 Laurence was severely injured when she jumped out of her fourth-floor flat. She has taken overdoses of pills and once tried to leap from a car on the motorway.

So concerned was Chirac about her that he got a businessman to rescue a Swiss clinic that was facing bankruptcy so that her treatment would not be interrupted.

As for Claude, tragedy struck again in 1998 when Jacques Pilhan, a spin doctor who had taught her the tricks of the trade and whom she regarded as a second father, died of cancer.

“It took her a while to get over it,” said a friend.

The family has paid dearly for power. In the last days of his reign, Chirac has become a symbol of failure, discredited for having befriended African despots while alienating his countrymen.

He has withdrawn behind the palace walls with courtiers such as Claude as the country limps from one crisis to another, presiding over the collapse of France’s status in Europe and its growing isolation on the wider international stage.

He came to power with a pledge to heal the “social fracture” but deepening social divisions resulted in the worst street riots since the 1960s.

“It is hard to see how history can judge that legacy kindly,” said one European diplomat.

Will that discourage 11-year-old Martin from one day pursuing a political career and a possible Chirac comeback? His grandfather no doubt likes that idea. His mother will have to advise him.

Times Recommends

• No apology for Germany’s own Nazi victims
• Intricate web of fear and hope tying down deal
• Victims remembered a year after Mumbai attacks