Word: bookings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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. (Read TIME's perspective on Diana, 10 years after her death...
...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...
...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 postpresidential liaison by describing his fictional President's affair while in office - unfounded speculation fanned by Giscard's remaining tight-lipped. (See pictures of a service of thanks for Diana...
...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...