The president - Georges Simenon

At 82, the former premier lives in alert and suspicious retirement - self exile - on the Normandy coast, writing his anxiously anticipated memoirs and receiving visits from statesmen and biographers. In his library is the self-condemning, handwritten confession of the premier's former attache, Chalamont, hidden between the pages of a sumptuously produced work of privately printed pornography - a confession that the premier himself had dictated and forced Chalamont to sign. Inspired by French Premier Clemenceau, this is a psychological masterpiece.