Some people you simply don't picture at the VIP Room. Bernadette Chirac was one of them, which is precisely what makes the image so sharp.
For years, the wife of Jacques Chirac spent a few summer weeks in Saint-Tropez. Sénéquier, the red-awning café on the port, a short espresso in the morning sun, the regulars drifting past. Nothing unusual for a figure of official France on holiday.
But Bernadette ran on a different clock. «Mon mari aime bien se coucher de bonne heure», she once said of her husband, without a trace of apology, adding that she herself was the opposite. So while the President slept, she stepped into the Tropezian night. The VIP Room, that unapologetically glittering club by the water, saw her on its dancefloor more than once.
The contrast is worth sitting with. A grande bourgeoise with Gaullist pedigree, as comfortable in the salons of the Élysée as in the bass-heavy dark of a nightclub. Saint-Tropez has a rare talent for making that kind of contradiction feel perfectly natural. Here, the countess dances next to the property developer; the fisherman drinks across from the superyacht. After midnight, no one asks for your credentials.
Bernadette Chirac passed away in September 2023. These summers on the peninsula look, in hindsight, like a far livelier self-portrait than any official photograph.
