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All this was pretty fanciful. But whatever the truth, Pesquet had clearly outmaneuvered Mitterrand. As France's rightists gloated over the left's discomfiture, Mitterrand struck back in L'Express. Faced with government action to strip him of his parliamentary immunity to prosecution, Mitterrand charged that the plot against him was the work of five right-wing "assassins"—Deputies Jean-Baptiste Biaggi, Pascal Arrighi and Jean-Marie Le Pen, former Police Inspector Jean Dides and ex-Deputy Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour. Their motive, according to Mitterrand: the fact that as a Cabinet minister he had prosecuted l'affaire des fuites security leaks) and l'affaire de bazooka (the attempted assassination of former Algerian Commander General Raoul Salan), in which all five rightists had played some role.
Mitterrand's riposte was a shrewd one; it left Biaggi & Co. little choice but to sue him for defamation. And this, in turn, would mean the reopening of the still unresolved l'affaire des fuites and l'affaire de-bazooka, which might prove embarrassing for men still prominent in French public life. Cynical Parisians observe that at a certain crucial moment in every affaire, after all the headlines, things mysteriously close over again. An unimportant figure or two may be convicted of something; the rest is silence, and huge dossiers gathering dust in police files.
*No. 1: l'affaire Lacaze (TIME, Feb. 2), in which a neo-Gaullist Resistance veteran alleges that he was offered $31,000 to murder the adopted son of one of the richest women in France. This scandal reflected on the new Fifth Republic, and was immediately countered by Scandal No. 2, l'affaire des ballets roses, which reflected on the previous Fourth Republic. In this, charges that obscene parties of nymphets from the Paris Opera had been staged at his official residence resulted in the indictment of a former Speaker of the French Assembly.