Jacques Chirac's former driver published a book of muckraking memoirs yesterday which, France being France, will probably do the president's reputation at home no harm at all.

Vingt-cinq Ans avec Lui -Twenty-five Years with Him - by Jean-Claude Laumond, who was Mr Chirac's personal chauffeur from 1972 until he was fired in 1997, is the most intimate portrait of a sitting president yet published in France.

Besides suggesting that the Paris town hall, which Mr Chirac ran for nearly 20 years, was "awash with cash" used for illicit purposes, it portrays the president as a serial seducer with an inexhaustible appetite for sex.

A chapter called The Warrior at Rest takes readers on a veritable gallop through a thicket of amorous encounters.

"He has had innumerable party activists... He has known, in the biblical sense, actresses - Italian and otherwise - journalists and all sorts of women about whom it might be flattering to be said that one is their lover," Mr Laumond writes.

Female staff at the Left Bank headquarters of the president's RPR party, he adds, used to joke with each other: "Chirac? Three minutes, with the shower après included."

The driver, who talks of Mr Chirac's wife, Bernadette, waiting at the window for his return, even claims that the reason the president could not be contacted when Diana, Princess of Wales, died in Paris in August 1997 was that he was "with another woman".

Le Monde said the book marked "a whole new step in French publishing that brings us closer to our European neighbours, and particularly Britain, where what one might call 'butler's lit' is a literary tradition if not an entire genre".