THE former French president Jacques Chirac has broken a long silence about his private life, describing a relationship with a blonde 18-year-old “southern belle” in America and the anorexia that led to his daughter’s repeated attempts at suicide.

As he prepares for trial next year on corruption charges, Chirac, 76, has avoided any mention of sleaze allegations in the first volume of his memoirs, published last week. Nor has he said anything in Each Step Should Be a Goal — covering the period up to his election as president in 1995 — about the numerous affairs he is rumoured to have conducted since his marriage to Bernadette Chodron de Courcel, the mother of his daughters, Laurence, 51, and Claude, 47.

However, he fondly recalls a summer course he attended at Harvard Business School in 1953. The 20-year-old Chirac was already going out with Bernadette, a fellow student at the Sciences Politiques institute in Paris.

“We were indispensable to each other,” he writes, adding: “I would be lying if I said that I’d given up, at the same time, the company of the other young ladies at Sciences Po.”

In America he fell for the “ravishing” Florence Herlihy, from South Carolina. She drove a white Cadillac convertible and called him “honey child”.

“We quickly considered getting engaged, even though I was already partly committed to Bernadette,” Chirac writes. Both sets of parents opposed the idea and that September he broke up with Herlihy. The following month he became engaged to Bernadette.

Chirac also discloses in his book that he lost his virginity to an Algerian prostitute at 18, when he was a sailor.

“The bosun asked me whether I was a virgin,” he writes. “I said yes. ‘Well, we’ll have to sort that out. You’ll see,’ he told me. It was very nice of him and it had to be done. He took me to one of those famous areas of the kasbah where we spent the whole night.”

In a poignant passage, Chirac blames himself for taking too little care of his daughters, a task he delegated to his wife. He recalls the summer of 1973, when he was agriculture minister and his daughter Laurence, then 15, developed a high fever and refused to eat, the first sign of her anorexia.

Several specialists said the condition could be linked to her relationship with her father. “Did I not spend enough time with her? Did she suffer a lot from that, without my having realised?” Chirac wondered.

“For a long time I did my best to come and have lunch with her every day ... to train her to eat. It was pointless.”

His daughter made several suicide attempts. In 1990 she threw herself from her fourth-floor flat in Paris but survived.

Chirac faces a 10-year prison sentence if convicted of hiring 21 cronies for allegedly “fake jobs” while he was mayor of Paris between 1977 and 1995. Last week he said he had nothing to reproach himself for and would “naturally” attend the trial. “I will say the truth, what I know, what I believe,” he said.

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