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PARIS — Jacques Chirac will be remembered by many people for his refusal to join the American war against Iraq in 2003 and his failure to revive a weak French economy.
I remember him for something else, too. He was the first Frenchman to kiss my hand. It was the fall of 2002, and Mr. Chirac was seven years into his 12-year presidency. The Bush administration was moving toward war with Iraq, and the relationship between France and the United States was worse than it had been in decades.
I had just become the Paris bureau chief for The New York Times. Mr. Chirac was receiving me and Roger Cohen, then The Times’s foreign editor, one Sunday morning in the Élysée Palace to announce a French-led strategy to avoid war. He shook hands with Roger and welcomed me with an old-fashioned baisemain, a kiss of the hand.
I was vaguely uncomfortable that Mr. Chirac was adding a personal dimension to a professional encounter and assuming I would like it. But he naturally incorporated all his seductive skills, including his well-practiced baisemain, into his diplomatic style, power-kissing the hands of power women around the world, from Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (twice in one visit) and first lady Laura Bush (she smiled but turned away).
No matter that Mr. Chirac got the centuries-old ritual of gallantry all wrong. The hand kiss is supposed to hover in the air, never land on the skin.
I once witnessed him kissing the hand of his dear friend Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor and a former minister of health. Mr. Chirac stretched out his arms and extended his hands three times as if he were rushing out from the wings onto center stage in a Broadway musical. Then he grabbed her hand and smacked it. Loudly. She gave him a smile of friendship.
It was that enthusiasm, that love of life, that made Mr. Chirac a beloved politician in so many quarters. In a 2002 poll about seduction and politics, a majority of the French women surveyed said they would rather have dinner with Mr. Chirac than with any other politician.
He was never as monarchical, mysterious or intellectual as his predecessor and political rival, François Mitterrand. Mr. Chirac’s appeal was as a man of the soil who savored country life in Corrèze, a farming area in southwestern France where he and his wife, Bernadette, had a chateau. He enjoyed petting cows and tickling goats at France’s annual Salon de l’Agriculture. He was forgiven his taste for Mexican beer because he drank oceans of French wine as well.
From the time he was a young politician, Mr. Chirac was a tireless campaigner who drew energy from the “bain de foule” — the “crowd bath,” or mingling with the crowds. He treated his presidency as a never-ending campaign, frustrating his security guards, who didn’t seem to be able to rein him in.
In 2003, on the first state visit by a French president to Algeria since its independence from France, I saw how oblivious he was to security concerns. He plunged into the crowd along the corniche, zigzagging back and forth along the main boulevard to grab the hands of Algerians kept back by iron railings and a phalanx of blue-uniformed police officers in white gloves and spats.
The cries from the crowd were not “Vive la France!” or “Vive Chirac!” Rather, the word that was heard over and over as Mr. Chirac reached out to touch his former countrymen was, “Visa! Visa! Visa!” He didn’t seem to notice, or didn’t care.
He enjoyed playing the role of “grand séducteur” in both politics and his personal life. He confessed to a biographer and later in his runaway best-selling autobiography in 2009 that he had loved many women in his lifetime, “as discreetly as possible.” Bernadette Chirac confessed her jealousy in a 2001 book of interviews, “Conversation,” but stayed married for “familial traditions.”
She carved out a professional life of her own as a local official in Corrèze. She told me on the campaign trail for her re-election in 2004 that she ignored his remarks that she was getting too old for the job: “My husband literally said to me, ‘Isn’t this one time too many?’ I didn’t answer.”
As Mr. Chirac’s own time in office wound to an end, his legacy was tainted by a string of corruption charges. But an overwhelming majority of the French approved of his management of foreign affairs, particularly his role as the European leader who led the opposition to the Iraq War.
I had only one falling out with Mr. Chirac in the years I covered his presidency. It came during an interview with The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune (which The New York Times owned) and a French magazine in 2007. The subject was supposed to be the environment; it moved into a discussion of Iran and its nuclear program.
Mr. Chirac had only a few months longer in office and was beginning to show signs of weariness. He read without passion or much conviction from talking points printed in large letters and highlighted in yellow and pink. He appeared distracted at times, grasping for names and dates. His hands shook slightly.
He suddenly came alive when I asked him whether Iran had the right to a peaceful nuclear energy program. Then he veered from the prepared script that long had been articulated by France and much of the rest of the world about the importance of preventing Iran from having nuclear weapons.
“Having one or perhaps a second bomb a little later, well, that’s not very dangerous,” he said. Mr. Chirac explained that it would be an act of self-destruction for Iran to use a nuclear weapon against another country. “Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel?” he asked. “It would not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed to the ground.”
Mr. Chirac’s aides tried to put these remarks off the record. They sent a heavily doctored official transcript of the interview, leaving out his comments about Iran and the bomb. When that failed, they called me; Alison Smale, then managing editor of The International Herald Tribune, and the French journalists back for a second interview to clarify France’s position. Mr. Chirac thanked us effusively for returning and said there had been a misunderstanding on Iran. “I drifted — because I thought we were off the record,” he said.
“Mr. President, it was I who asked the question about Iran,” I replied. “I asked it honestly and politely. I am sorry if you somehow had the impression that we were off the record …”
Mr. Chirac cut me off. “Chère Madame, no, I am not under this impression,” he said. “It is I who was wrong. I don’t want to question that. I should rather have paid more attention to what I was saying and understood that perhaps I was on the record.” He added, “It was I who should have said, ‘We are off the record,’ and I didn’t say it.”
Mr. Chirac had admitted he was wrong. A class act, I thought. As we were leaving, he took my hand and kissed it, his lips touching my skin. He said I should come back to talk again, any time.
As I said goodbye to the aides, France’s national security adviser, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, asked me what I was going to write. “I’m going to write both interviews,” I said. Alison agreed wholeheartedly.
That was not the answer he wanted to hear. The Élysée assumed that Mr. Chirac’s charming mea culpa would convince us to only write the “official” revised interview and to ignore what he had said the day before. I told Mr. Gourdault-Montagne that it would be dishonest to rewrite history. He lost his temper and raised his voice. He told me that the story would embolden Hamas and Hezbollah in the Middle East, harden Iran’s negotiating stance in international nuclear talks, and make China and Russia even more unwilling to threaten sanctions against Iran. He said I personally would have to take responsibility.
Later, Jean-David Levitte, France’s ambassador to Washington, made some of the same points in a phone conversation with Bill Keller, then The Times’s executive editor. No matter. The story ran on the front page.
As for Mr. Chirac, he never invited me back, and left office soon afterward.
Elaine Sciolino is the author of the book “The Seine: The River That Made Paris,” to be published by W. W. Norton & Co. in October.
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