Forsaking Cancer Medication, Mitterrand Wrote Own Final Chapter

Francois Mitterrand, apparently deciding that he was ready to face death, stopped taking his cancer medication two days before he died and spent his final hours completing his memoirs and writing three pages of instructions for his funeral, associates said Friday.

The former French president, who died Monday at 79 after a long battle with prostate cancer, had spent much of his last year reading literature about death and questioning experts on the subject. An intellectual and an atheist, he was searching for an answer to the question: What is after death?

By last weekend, friends said, he had found an answer that satisfied him.

“A few days before his death, he told me, ‘Now I have my philosophy,’ ” Roland Dumas, a former French foreign minister and close Mitterrand friend, told French television.

He added that Mitterrand had asked him to set up a research foundation that would bear his name, though he declined to say what the institution would study.

Mitterrand had decided last Saturday that he was ready to die and, in effect, chose the timing, the Paris newspaper Le Monde reported Friday.

The paper said Mitterrand had asked his doctor, Jean-Pierre Tarot, how long he would survive if he took only his painkillers. Told that he would be dead within three days, Mitterrand stopped his treatments.

A day later, Mitterrand delivered the hand-written instructions for his funeral to his doctor and Andre Rousselet, a longtime associate. And, according to France Soir, a Paris newspaper, Mitterrand then concluded the 800-page manuscript of a still-untitled book.

Mitterrand’s long fascination with death and mysticism was well-known. He was said to have known the final resting places of many of France’s greatest figures and made frequent journeys to their tombs. He once remarked that “he who loves death loves life.”

As his illness worsened last year, he expressed a strong desire to finish his second seven-year term as president, which he did in May. His other dream was to write his memoirs, giving his perspective on history, a subject that obsessed him for most of his life.

Dozens of authors have written books about the inscrutable man who has been called “the Sphinx,” and most of those books were best-sellers in France.

But “there is a book, and one book only, authored by Francois Mitterrand alone,” an unnamed editor at the publishing house told France Soir.

Writing with a fountain pen, Mitterrand spent long hours working on the book during his recent Christmas vacation trip to Egypt.

“He worked on it until his last day, and he finished what he had to do,” the editor said.

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Mitterrand’s feelings about death and an afterlife had long fascinated his fellow citizens in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country.

The newspaper Le Figaro asked him some months ago if he believed in the immortality of the soul.

“Not especially,” Mitterrand had responded. “But I believe in the power of the spirit. Without that, what would a man be?”

Asked whether he believed in God, Mitterrand referred to 16th century essayist Michel de Montaigne, responding: “Let’s say I have a mystical soul and a rational brain, and, like Montaigne, I am incapable of choosing between them. I don’t know if I believe in God, but I am often tempted to believe.”