The president

Restored to print for the first time in more than forty years, The President was hailed by the New York Times as a ';tour de force'At 82, the former premier lives in alert and suspicious retirementself exileon 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 pornographya 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 characterand 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.From the Trade Paperback edition.