Francois Mitterrand, 78 and dying, undimmed by scandals that clouded his 14-year reign, is leaving the Elysee Palace with all of the grandeur befitting France's last elected monarch.
In a manner recalling Louis XIV's remark, "After me, the flood," he has let it be known that he regards the candidates for his job as mere politicians in a different sort of France.A new president, to be chosen May 7, will inherit the presidential powers defined by Charles de Gaulle, who meant to shape the Fifth Republic as a civilizing force in a benighted world.
Jacques Chirac, the conservative leader favored to win, already has shed his lean and hungry look of years past. To his populist press-the-flesh style, he has added a deepened, reflective voice of regal timbre.
But most Frenchmen, more concerned with getting by in hard times than with national glory, expect any new leader to confront workaday reality in a way the socialist Mitterrand managed masterfully to avoid.
From the night in 1981 when Frenchmen danced in the streets, waving the Socialist Party rose, Mitterrand has incarnated France. Electoral defeats, economic crisis and scandal passed below him.
With hauteur and sphinx-like silence, he eluded charges that tainted his office: insider trading, illegal campaign funds, a dubious loan that led to a prime minister's suicide.
Early on, French agents sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, killing a crewman. Evidence implicated the Elysee. A decade later, no one has determined what the president knew.
After his re-election in 1988, prosecutors accused a close friend of enriching himself and other Mitterrand intimates in a stock market scam. The man died and not much more was revealed.
Then the courts investigated dummy companies set up to allow improper contributions to finance the 1988 Socialist campaign. The clouds passed, leaving behind mystery.
Voters punished the Socialists in 1993, giving conservatives 80 percent of the seats in Parliament. Mitterrand dropped in popularity. He took little note, talking of grander things, such as France's role in Europe.
More recently, he shrugged off an expose that he held a job in the Nazi-backed Vichy government during World War II and later maintained a close friendship with a former Vichy police chief.
When the news magazine Paris Match revealed that he had a 20-year-old daughter, born to a mistress, he embraced her with no apologies. That was his personal business, he said.
He remained silent when Bernard Tapie, a flamboyant politician and entrepreneur he championed, was led off in handcuffs on fraud charges. Tapie also is on trial for fixing a football match.
Periodically, Mitterrand confounded his enemies and allies alike, suddenly changing the national tone with a grand gesture.
When negotiators squabbled over Bosnia, he flew to Sarajevo, a frail symbol in an outsized flak jacket. When Bill Clinton vilified Fidel Castro's new opening in Cuba, Mitterrand had Castro to lunch.
Detractors called his style Florentine, hinting of Machiavelli. The president preferred to think of himself as Venetian, skilled at statecraft and political subtleties without the daggers or poison.
Through it all, his nickname was "Tonton," an affectionate word for uncle. French papers often referred to him as "Dieu" - God. As his mandate ends, he is again high in popularity polls.
"I am the Frenchmen's punching bag," he remarked once, when social troubles and economic woes unsettled France. "But it is well-known in that sport that the boxer tires before the bag."
Mitterrand, in pain from prostate cancer, is now fading fast. Despite Socialist Party pleas for more active campaign support, he has directed flagging energies to defining his place in history.
"Yes, I love history, to place myself in history," he said. "One barely recalls Tutankhamen. What will be said of General de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard, myself and those who follow during the next few thousand years?"