Tabloids Ablaze with another Diana Affair Speculated
Cited: Time
A French newspaper, “Le Figaro“, gave the fans a look at a new book due out in October with a full-page ad that is started international coverage of the book. Le Figaro is once again inspired interest in Princess Diana by exploiting the obvious similarities between the lovers referred to in the book title as Giscard and Diana. It seems that the story itself hints at a real-life affair between Princess Di who died in a car crash in Paris in 1997 and the author.
“I wish that you love that me,” says Patricia, Princess of Cardiff, who’s mangled English is one of the few notable differences between her character and the real-life Diana, Princess of Wales. Her would-be lover is French President Jacques-Henri Lambertye — drawn, it seems, to closely resemble real-life former President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. “I still hear her saying it in English,” the writer reveals. “It’s not my memory reminding me of it, but her voice.” The florid romantic tale, titled The Princess and the President, might have passed largely unnoticed into the annals of pulp fiction were it not for the fact that its author is former President Giscard himself. Although the author remains silent amid the media furor, some newspapers have covered the book as though it might be a thinly disguised kiss-and-tell.
“Fiction or reality?” Le Figaro asked in a headline alongside a November 1994 photo of a tuxedo-clad Giscard being gazed upon by a glowing Diana during a charity event. “Only the former President holds the key to this troubling story.” So far, the former President isn’t telling.
In the book, the 83-year-old Giscard traces the histoire d’amour between Lambertye and Princess Patricia. During a G-7 meeting at Buckingham Palace in the 1980s, the enchanting royal admits to the Frenchman she has thrown herself into charity work to escape a bleak married life. “Ten days before my marriage, my future husband told me he had a mistress and that he had decided to continue his relationship with her,” she confides to her smitten presidential admirer — who drops the statesman act and goes French on her.
“I kissed her hand,” Lambertye continues, “and she looked at me questioningly, her eyes now slate-colored and widening as she bowed her face forward.”
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Eventually Lambertye makes his first overt move by holding Patricia’s hand during a train ride back from a 1984 D-Day anniversary ceremony in Normandy. Similar expressions of hand endearment follow, before the pair open the seriously carnal chapter of their affair in a presidential château in Rambouillet — where Giscard himself used to hold hunting expeditions in the surrounding woods.
“The ritual of the hunt was always the same,” Giscard writes in yet another juxtaposition of his history and his novel.
And if such blurring of lines between imagination and reality were not enough, Giscard starts the novel with the epigraph “Promise kept.” Myriad press reports of the book have paired that opener with final lines of the tale, in which Patricia tells Lambertye, “You asked my permission to write your story. I grant it to you, but you must make me a promise …” Such subtlety is usually administered with a sledgehammer.
But could such an affair have actually happened? Certainly not in the way the book describes, because Giscard had been voted out of office and into semiretirement by 1981 — the same year Diana’s royal marriage launched her rise to international stardom. However, press reports speculate over whether he could have been hinting at a post-presidential liaison by describing his fictional President’s affair while in office — unfounded speculation fanned by Giscard’s remaining tight-lipped.
Many pundits are alleging that the timing — and questionable taste — of Giscard’s book is driven by the fact that fellow former President Jacques Chirac will publish a memoir of his own political career next month. Enduring hatred between the two men stretches back to the mid-1970s; each has waged a campaign of electoral war and political brawling against the other ever since. The Princess and the President, some pundits say, is Giscard’s newest attempt to steal the limelight from his nemesis.
“Giscard wants to divert attention from Chirac’s book and doesn’t care how low he has to stoop or ridiculous he looks doing it,” says commentator and humor writer Bruno Gaccio. “Giscard occupies the media with a laughable novel as Chirac rolls out the story of his life in politics.”
However, Gaccio suggests French machismo may also be at work. “People always speak of [fellow former French President François] Mitterrand and Chirac as great ladies’ men, and [current French President Nicolas] Sarkozy went out and married a top model, but who refers to Giscard as a seducer?” Gaccio asks. “No one — so he’s decided to do so himself, with a story whose leading lady is no longer around to debunk it.”
It looks like Giscard will be laughing all the way to the bank if the book sales match the initial press attention that the book has gotten. Many of the inquisitive fans will be watching for any sign of him giving some of that money to Diana’s charities to find out if the story is true. Others will pray that he does not send any money to the charities, which will prove that it is not true.
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My Take: I know that Princess Diana and was a very loved person. I also know that she did a lot of good in her lifetime. However, who gives a darn whether she had an affair or not. It is her public life that made her so popular. Her private life was her own and should remain that way.
It absolutely amazes me how they ends have an insatiable desire to know what their idols are doing every minute of every day. They are human just like the fans are! They do what everybody else does! They put their pants on one leg at a time just like the fans do. I am a firm believer in the phrase “what happens behind closed doors is private”.
I also believe that the paparazzi are the reason that Princess Di is dead! If it had not been for the paparazzi trying to chase her down in a private moment, whether she was drunk or not, she would probably be alive today. The paparazzi take the term “freedom of the press” to extremes and it causes major problems in all aspects of life.
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