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 statesman 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. Now the long-thwarted Chalamont has been summoned to form a new coalition in the wake of the government’s collapse. The premier alone possesses the secret of Chalamont’s guilt, of his true character-and has publicly vowed- He’ll never be Premier as long as I’m alive… Nor when I’m dead, either. Inspired by French Premier Georges Clemenceau, The President is a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a probing account of the decline of power.