Boris Johnson, arms dealing, drug trafficking, the Taliban, the Triads, the CIA, the Iraq war and Saddam's secret search for a nuclear bomb: When my phone rang in the lobby of the Shanker Hotel, I knew nothing of these aspects of the story that had brought me to Kathmandu. "Hello, Andrew," whispered a distinctive French accent. "This is Charles, Charles Sobhraj." It had been 15 years since I'd last heard from Sobhraj, quite possibly the most disarming serial killer in criminal history, but his voice was instantly recognizable. Back in the Seventies, Sobhraj murdered at least ten people, mostly Western travellers along the Asian hippie trail. Some estimates number his victims as high as 24, but the truth is no one will ever know the exact figure. In those days visitors entered and left countries like Thailand, Hong Kong and Nepal with minimum official processing. Young idealists, trusting backpackers and hash-smoking stoners were looking to get lost, and Sobhraj made sure some of them were never found.

He was a charismatic figure, fluent in several languages, and finely tuned to what budget travellers wanted. He would befriend them, advise them on where to eat and how to buy gemstones, sometimes put them up at the Bangkok apartment he shared with his French-Canadian girlfriend, and then kill them. He killed them by first drugging their drinks and then stabbing or choking them. Sometimes he would complete the murder by setting the body on fire - in more than one case, investigators found that the victim was not dead when he or she was set alight. He became known as the Bikini Killer after the swimsuit one of his victims was wearing when she was discovered. Afterwards, he would steal their belongings and identities, often travelling the world on their passports and money. Like some bizarre real-life combination of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley and Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter, he was handsome, charming and utterly without scruple. And such was the richly implausible nature of his exploits that Sobhraj generated his own impressive literary testaments. First Richard Neville, the celebrated chronicler of the Sixties counterculture, drew an extended taped confession from Sobhraj in The Life And Crimes Of Charles Sobhraj - later renamed The Shadow Of The Cobra. The book was published in 1979, after the Frenchman of Vietnamese and Indian parentage had been on trial in India in 1977, when he thought the admission couldn't hurt him. Later, he realized that the confession might prove problematic and denied everything he told Neville about the murders. In 1979, Thomas Thompson added an equally disturbing portrait with Serpentine. Both titles played on the Serpent, the nickname Sobhraj had been given by the press because he was cunning and slippery, capable of beguiling sang-froid and poisonous violence.

I had last seen Sobhraj in 1997, just after he was released from two decades in an Indian prison. He had been captured in 1976 while drugging 60 French engineering students in Delhi. He was also charged with the murders of an Israeli academic in Varanasi and a French tourist in Delhi. But he managed to avoid conviction for either of the killings, and instead received a 12-year sentence for the attempted robbery of the students. On release, he was due to be extradited to Thailand, where he faced the death penalty for several murders. To avoid that outcome, he escaped from prison and then allowed himself to be caught and sentenced to a term that would bring him up to 20 years - the statute of limitations on his Thai arrest warrant.

All of which meant that in 1997 he returned to Paris, where I went to interview him for the Observer. There is a great deal of mythology surrounding serial killers and, indeed, the term itself is not exactly a scientific designation. Criminologists tend to define serial killers as people who have murdered three or more times over an extended period. There is usually also a psychological - rather than purely material - aspect to the killings, and perhaps a ritualized element, too. They typically have a background in crime and they tend to select their victims from a particular social group or demographic. Sobhraj conformed to many but not all of these characteristics. But regardless of how he was defined, I wanted to know what he thought about his past deeds. After all, it's not often that renowned multiple killers are at liberty and available to talk. He was staying in a tiny room at the Lutetia, the Left Bank hotel that was requisitioned by the Nazi Secret Service during the war. The first thing he did when I knocked on the door was offer me an open bottle of Coke, which was also the way he had incapacitated many of his victims. It was a little playful test, and one I politely turned down. He was by turns funny, enigmatic, absurd and engaging. Although he tried to keep me off balance by, for example, driving me to an empty restaurant in the outer suburbs of Paris, he didn't seem scary. But presumably that's what his victims thought as well. Despite my pressing, he refused to speak about the murders, only allowing that there were things in his past that he regretted but they were now behind him and he wanted to start life anew. But what could he do? What skills could he employ in France and who would employ him? He talked of making money from his story, whose financial worth he lavishly overvalued, and he also mentioned ambitions in film. He called me at the Observer after my piece appeared and said he was coming to London. I was a little anxious that he had taken objection to my portrayal of him as a dissembling if captivating psychopath. But he wasn't interested in settling any scores. "I'm looking for a literary agent," he told me. "Can you recommend one?" His efforts to sell his prison memoirs came to nothing, however, and six years later he was arrested in Nepal for the murders in December 1975 of 28-year-old American backpacker Connie Jo Bronzich and her friend, a Canadian by the name of Laurent Carri?re, whose mutilated corpses were found that Christmas in fields near Kathmandu. Bronzich had last been seen in the company of a mysterious French gemstone dealer who looked like Sobhraj and used an alias, Alain Gautier, that Sobhraj often employed. When the Nepalese police questioned "Gautier", he claimed he was a Dutchman called Henricus Bintanja - who happened to be dead in Bangkok, another victim, it is thought, of Sobhraj. Confused by the ploy, the Nepalese police had allowed Gautier/ Bintanja to escape to Bangkok, this time using Carri?re's passport. Yet almost 30 years later Sobhraj returned to Nepal and was arrested, tried and sentenced to 20 years in jail. What had driven him to risk lengthy imprisonment in this impoverished mountain state? The explanation he gave to the press at the time didn't ring true. "The charges are rubbish," he complained in 2004. "I am a busy man with my own film production company in Paris. I came here to make a TV documentary on local handicrafts and to see if I can do some humanitarian work." Handicrafts? Humanitarian work? That didn't sound like Sobhraj. There had to be another reason, something vaguely plausible, at least. But what was it? The Casino Royale at Hotel Yak & Yeti in central Kathmandu does not entirely live up to its James Bond billing. It's a rough-and-ready place, low on elegance, but with a lively local clientele who tend to shout a lot around the gaming tables, and a posse of security muscle stationed on the floor, ready to settle disputes. In one way or another, casinos have often proved Sobhraj's downfall. Sometimes he would gamble away huge sums of money - he once lost $200,000 at the tables in Rouen. Other times, his gambling debts would lead him to take excessive risks. In September 2003 Sobhraj came to the Casino Royale every night for two weeks to play blackjack. "He didn't bet high stakes and he didn't talk to anyone," the manager Ramesh Babu Shreastha told me. "I kept trying to find out what he was doing, but he wouldn't say. Eventually word got round that he was Charles Sobhraj, so one of my staff asked his name and he said, 'Sob.'" Soon recognized by a journalist, Sobhraj found himself in the Himalayan Times. Nepal is a strange and mystifying society. Until quite recently it was a monarchist state in which the royal family lived lives of extraordinary luxury amid the surrounding squalor endured by most of its subjects. Then, in June 2001, in the splendid Narayanhiti royal palace, Crown Prince Dipendra slaughtered nine other members of the royal family, including the king and queen, before killing himself. The monarchy never recovered, and under the added pressure of a Maoist insurgency, Nepal was declared a republic in 2008. Since then the Maoists have dominated the political scene, without ever holding complete power, and have showed themselves to be every bit as corrupt and self-serving as their predecessors. Glaring injustices and abuse of power are a conspicuous part of everyday life, so it was not particularly shocking that a famous serial killer wanted for two murders in Nepal was gambling openly at the capital's main casino. Nonetheless, even the police eventually took notice. Four days after the Himalayan Times ran its story, deputy superintendent Ganesh arrested Sobhraj at the Casino Royale. Sobhraj insisted that he had never been to Nepal before in his life. For his part, Ganesh claimed that as a young boy he had been traumatized by seeing Connie Jo Bronzich's burnt and naked corpse in a field near his home. Not only did he know that Sobhraj was guilty, he said, the case was a matter of personal catharsis. Sobhraj has always been provocative in his choice of lawyers. He used to be represented by Jacques Verg?s, the "devil's advocate", who has defended every tyrant and war criminal from Klaus Barbie to Slobodan Milosevic. Now his main lawyer is Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, who is married to the renowned international terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. Sobhraj met his current Nepalese lawyer, Shakuntala Thapa, through her daughter, 24-year-old Nihita Biswas, who acted as his translator during one of the Frenchman's many appeals. Six years ago, when she was just 20, Biswas married Sobhraj in a ceremony inside Kathmandu Central Jail.

I met Thapa and Biswas together in Kathmandu to discuss Sobhraj and his case. Thapa was adamant that Ganesh, the policeman, had made the story up about seeing Bronzich's body when he was a boy to create greater publicity for himself. "He's an old friend of mine," she said, "and he admitted it was all a lie."

Biswas says she is no longer able to visit her husband owing to pressure from the authorities. However, she remains a staunch advocate of his cause and the attention she has garnered, due to her husband, hasn't been all bad. In autumn 2011, she appeared as a contestant on Bigg Boss, India's equivalent of Celebrity Big Brother. Feisty and articulate, she ran through all the legal flaws in the prosecution's case. There seems little doubt that had the same quality of evidence produced in the Kathmandu court been put to a judge and jury in Britain, the case would have been dismissed. But there is even less doubt that Sobhraj committed the murders. "I don't think so," says Biswas, when I ask her if she thinks Sobhraj has ever killed anyone. "He's too stupid for that. He is not a psycho." It's debatable whether or not Sobhraj is a psychopath - he certainly doesn't seem constrained by an overdeveloped sense of empathy - but he is clearly not stupid, despite his prison record. In any case, it requires no great intellect to kill someone. I asked Biswas how she would feel if she discovered that her husband was indeed a killer. "I would see," she said, unflustered. "Everyone has good and bad sides. Even bad deeds with good intentions can be good deeds."

Both in and out of jail, Sobhraj has always had a way with women. With his wide cheekbones, shapely thick lips, piercing eyes, lithe, muscular build, confident manner and dangerous reputation, he presented an irresistible challenge to many female suitors. And Sobhraj was not unaware of his magnetic appeal. There was a narcissism about him, perhaps best captured in a photograph of him that police found, in which he is lying naked on a bed, proudly displaying an erection for the camera. When I met him in Paris he boasted of his exploits in Tihar prison in New Delhi. "I had a lot of female visitors," he told me, "mainly journalists and MA students. Only intellectuals." He slept with many of them, including his lawyer, Sneh Senger, and became engaged to at least two others. There was Jacqueline Kuster, a German imprisoned on drug charges, and a young Punjabi who fell in love with him having read Neville's biography.

But his first and abiding love was Chantal Compagnon, a French woman from a deeply conservative background. He met her when he was 24 and fresh out of prison in Paris. He proposed to her within weeks and promised to go straight. But the very same day he was arrested for car theft and served eight months back inside. The couple married when Sobhraj was released and embarked on an epic crime spree across Europe and Asia, before settling in Mumbai with a newborn child and a profitable trade in stolen cars. The honeymoon ended in 1973 when Sobhraj was arrested for holding a flamenco dancer prisoner for three days in her New Delhi hotel room while he and an accomplice tried to drill through her floor to a gem store below. He eventually made off with thousands of pounds' worth of jewels. When captured, he feigned appendicitis and escaped from the hospital. On the run from the Indian police, Sobhraj and Compagnon sent their daughter back to Paris and moved on to Afghanistan, where they were soon imprisoned for car theft and not paying a hotel bill. If Sobhraj's greatest criminal weakness was his propensity to be caught, it was offset by an impressive strength: his ability to escape. His motto was: "When you feel the heat, go to the kitchen", and there is little question that he thrived in stressful situations. Several times when different police forces had him within their grasp, he coolly assumed the identity of another person - usually one of his victims - and talked his way out. He also escaped from three prisons in three different countries. In Afghanistan, he drugged his prison guard and disappeared, leaving his young wife in a cramped and dirty cell in Kabul prison. In Greece, he swapped identities with his brother, leaving him to serve an 18-year sentence. As he once explained to the same brother: "Always remember that their desire to keep me locked up is no match to my will to be free." If Sobhraj has a deep craving for liberty, he also appears to possess an unhealthy appetite for incarceration, having spent more than 35 years in prison. He yearns for life outside, but once there he soon finds himself back behind bars. This urge to run away can perhaps be traced back to his disrupted childhood. Sobhraj was born into the turmoil and violence of Saigon in 1944. He grew up amid terror on the city streets and fierce disputes at home. His father was a successful Indian tailor and his mother was his father's mistress, a local Vietnamese woman. The couple soon split up and Sobhraj lived with his mother and her new boyfriend, a French soldier. He was shunted back and forth between his parents and when he was nine, and officially stateless, deposited in a boarding school in France. But he hated his adoptive nation. He twice tried to return to Vietnam by stowing away on a ship - once, he got as far as Djibouti before being discovered and sent back to France. Viewed from a political perspective, it was a story of the times, a symbolic tale of colonial backlash, an uprooted war child fighting against an oppressive and uncaring system. But Sobhraj was not political. He was criminal. The authorities were mystified by the incorrigible recidivist who was in and out of reform school and prison during his teens. At times he could be articulate, thoughtful, sensitive; yet he was also wilful, stubborn and recklessly compulsive. With his wife behind bars in Afghanistan, he returned to France and kidnapped his daughter from her maternal grandparents. Then he headed back to Asia with a plan to bust Compagnon out of jail. Instead he was arrested and imprisoned in Tehran on suspicion of selling arms to the anti-Shah underground. It proved the last straw for his wife. On her release in Kabul, she met an American and moved with him and her daughter to America. Compagnon was replaced by a French-Canadian, Marie-Andr?e Leclerc. Travelling as Alain Gautier, he met Leclerc in Kashmir. She was a little-travelled medical secretary, quiet and emotionally needy. Sobhraj prided himself on his ability to read people. He analyzed character according to a system devised by the French psychologist Ren? Le Senne, a method he used to impose himself on the gullible. He was also a student of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's "will to power". In 1975, when the Nepal police raided Sobhraj's hastily abandoned hotel room after Bronzich's body was discovered, among the few items they found was a copy of Nietzsche's Beyond Good And Evil. A martial-arts fanatic, he seemed to be physically, psychologically and philosophically armed with everything required to dominate others. As Leclerc wrote in her diary, "I swore to try all means to make him love me, but little by little I became his slave." She also became his accomplice in theft and murder and ended up in an Indian prison, and died of cancer four years after her release. Sobhraj's other main partner in crime was Ajay Chowdhury, an Indian man with whom he carried out the most brutal murders. Chowdhury disappeared after a trip to Malaysia with Sobhraj and has never been seen again. As Neville noted: "Whatever life he touches, he wrecks. His pattern is to befriend, then drug and rob, or drug and murder, or, while in jail, manipulate and betray." I asked him in Paris about the power he held over those who came under his influence. "If you use it to make people do wrong it's an abuse," he said. "However, if you use that power to make people do right, it's OK." Who's to say what's right and wrong? "Ask Nietzsche," he replied with a grin. Getting to see Sobhraj in Kathmandu was not easy. A foreign diplomat told me that the French embassy made no secret of its arrangement with Kathmandu Central Jail, in which the two institutions referred potential visitors back and forth to each other until they gave up. That way, the previous ten journalist requests had been successfully steered into a dead end. Sobhraj was a nuisance for both the Nepalese and French, and neither wanted to afford him the opportunity for publicity. He has made a continual fuss about his conviction, appealing to everyone from the UN downwards, and is demanding EUR7 million compensation for unlawful imprisonment. There was also the small matter of Yousuf Ansari, a local media baron who shared the same block in the prison with Sobhraj. Two years ago Ansari was shot, but not fatally injured, by a would-be assassin who was said to be visiting Sobhraj in the prison. Sobhraj denied all knowledge of the plot, but the prison authorities claimed that the gunman had visited him 21 times in the preceding months. Even if the hired killer had been in collusion with Sobhraj, that didn't explain how he entered the prison with a gun - unless someone at the self-same prison authorities turned a blind eye. After a special plea to the prison minister, two meetings with the prison governor, three body searches and an armed escort, I entered the inner sanctum of the prison, which is run by the prisoners. It's a dusty, noisy place, like a cross between a bazaar and a dilapidated fort. I was shown into a narrow room with a long table, on the far side of which were the prisoners and on the other the visitors. Suddenly Sobhraj emerged from a door in the corner. He wore a flat cap and, like all the prisoners, civilian clothes. He looked small and inconsequential, but better than any 68-year-old who's spent the last ten years in a decrepit prison has any right to look. He greeted me warmly as if I were an old friend. "I'm almost 70," he said. "But I don't feel it, I feel 30!" He told me that he's been thinking of me recently because he's looking for someone to ghost his autobiography. "Think about the money," he said. "It's an incredible story. It will be a best-seller. There will be film rights, too." I asked whether he'd be prepared to discuss the murders in this best-seller. "I don't think we need to go into all that," he said, as if they were merely tiresome details. After politely sidestepping his offer, I got on to the question I'd been waiting a long time to ask: whatever made him come back to Nepal? "For a meeting with a major Chinese criminal," he said, matter-of-factly, within earshot of a prison guard. "I was looking to set up a heroin deal on behalf of the Taliban." So not handicrafts and humanitarianism.

He went on to explain that he had been working as an arms dealer to, among others, the Taliban, courtesy of an introduction from the Islamist terrorist leader Masood Azhar, a friend from his days in Tihar prison. The Taliban needed to sell heroin to buy arms and Sobhraj had contacts with the Triads, who were keen to buy heroin, so he offered to represent the Taliban in a meeting in Nepal. "But I was also working for the CIA," he added, as I'm still trying to put the pieces together. According to Sobhraj, he aimed to double- cross both parties and enable the CIA to smash an international drug and arms deal between a terrorist organization and a crime syndicate. "I risked my life for the war on terror," he protested, a little improbably, claiming that the CIA abandoned him when he was arrested. "They couldn't help me because I was undercover."

Whether or not he was working for the CIA, surely he must have realized that there was a risk of arrest, given that he was wanted for two murders in Nepal. He maintains that he was quite open with the Nepalese authorities, applying for a visa in France under his own name, assured that the charges were out of date. He then told me about being approached by an agent for Saddam Hussein's regime before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to buy red mercury, a semi-mythical substance that was said, without credible attribution, to be used in the creation of nuclear weapons. But my head was beginning to spin. The whole story from the Taliban to Saddam sounded like the product of an international class fantasist's imagination. I changed the topic and asked about Chantal Compagnon. "She left her husband and came back to Paris when she heard that I was back," he said with proprietorial pride, referring to his return in 1997. "I was still in love with Chantal, but I was with my Chinese wife who was pregnant, so I told Chantal, 'I can't be with you.'" All the same, he said he continued to see Compagnon while he was with his wife, who appears to have vanished from the scene. In fact, his relationship with Compagnon continued until less than three years ago, when she was threatened on the phone by an angry Nihita Biswas. After that, she cut contact with Sobhraj. "That's when she cut my money off," complained Sobhraj.

We spoke for almost two hours, in which Sobhraj jumped back and forth between countries and decades, never showing the slightest regret for the devastation he had wrought or the lives he'd ruined. The only topic that aroused his sense of injustice was his imprisonment, which he took to be one of the great judicial miscarriages of modern times. Towards the end, when he could perhaps sense my skepticism about the story he had told me, he insisted that I speak to the writer and film-maker Farrukh Dhondy. "He knows everything," he said. "You must talk to him."

We said our goodbyes and he told me to call him. I did, but there has been only silence.

Back in London I got in touch with Dhondy. A former commissioning editor at Channel 4, he is now a playwright, novelist and documentary maker. We met at his home in south London, where he spoke about first meeting Sobhraj. "I'd heard of him all through my life, being Indian, and his great escape from Tihar jail," said Dhondy. "Mention David Beckham in England, everybody knows. Mention Charles Sobhraj in India, everybody knows, north to south. He called me at my Channel 4 office in Charlotte Street in 1997. "'This is Charles Sobhraj,'" said Dhondy with pitch-perfect mimicry. "I said, 'You're the serial killer.' And he said, 'You could put it that way.'" The pair struck up what Dhondy describes as an "acquaintanceship", as the commissioning editor was intrigued to see where the story might lead. At first it led to the M25, where Dhondy was directed one morning by Sobhraj. "It was a hotel on the M20 junction," Dhondy recalled. Sobhraj was there with two large Belgians in leather jackets. He said, 'We're here to set up an antique furniture shop.'" Sobhraj wanted Dhondy to lease the shop as a British citizen and took him up to his hotel to show him a Russian manual full of armaments. "'You'll get ?100,000 if you do this for us,' he said, 'because we're not selling furniture. It's a front for selling arms. We're going to launder the money through the antiques job.'" Dhondy turned down the offer, but became convinced that Sobhraj was involved in the illegal arms trade. "He was selling to the Taliban. He played it both ways." The pair stayed in touch and in 2003, Sobhraj called Dhondy, who has a natural-sciences degree from Cambridge, to ask about red mercury. "I told him what I knew, that the Russians said that they had an isotope that could act as a trigger for nuclear bombs." Dhondy repeated the details that Sobhraj had told me in Kathmandu, the difference being that he had learned of them before Sobhraj went to prison. According to Sobhraj, two Arabs, probably Iraqis, contacted him from Bahrain. He claimed he had emails with coded references to red mercury that he could get from Belarus. He didn't show Dhondy the emails but asked him to help him sell the story. So Dhondy set up a meeting with Boris Johnson, the current mayor of London, who was then editor of the Spectator, at the Islington house of Peter Oborne, then the magazine's political editor. "Johnson turned up on his bicycle," recalled Dhondy. "He took me aside and said this is too big a story for the Spectator." It's a priceless scene, the man who many expect to replace David Cameron as Tory leader and a serial killer in discussion in an Islington drawing room. But unfortunately for political historians, Sobhraj wasn't present. He was relying on Dhondy to put his case. For his part, Johnson says that he, "clearly remembers making a clear decision not to proceed". "It was a good enough story to bring Boris to my house so it must have been tasty," recalled Oborne. "But it was too hot. Uncheckable. We suggested he try the Telegraph." Sobhraj took Johnson's advice and went to the Telegraph, but while he was still in talks with that paper, he went off to Nepal. Again, Dhondy believes the meeting in Nepal was a real one. He thinks the Chinese didn't turn up because they suspected that Sobhraj was double-crossing them. Dhondy had spoken to Chantal Compagnon who told him that Sobhraj had wanted to move to America with a new identity and money provided by the CIA. The idea that the Americans would make such provisions for a serial killer seems far-fetched, to say the least, although it's fair to say that in the past they have done business with people who are even more disreputable than Sobhraj. Compagnon also told Dhondy that Sobhraj had admitted the murders to her, describing them in detail. "She said he did them all," Dhondy said. If that didn't put her off him, you'd have thought she might have been disabused by his abuse of her. "Sobhraj took her to the border of France and Switzerland when she came back for him," said Dhondy, "and forced her to sell some land she had inherited. She got about ?40,000. He took it, got into the car, drove to Holland and gambled it all away. Every cent. I asked her why she came back to him, and she said, 'I love him.'"

Dhondy said Compagnon's theory about Sobhraj is that he can't live without prison, the regime, the routine and the status he enjoys there. "He can't deal with the outside world," said Dhondy. "He finds himself not famous, whereas in prison he's a somebody." Nevertheless, a few years ago, while he was working in India, Dhondy received a phone call from Sobhraj in Kathmandu Central Jail. He asked Dhondy to investigate the availability of hot-air balloons. The film-maker got a researcher to look into it and they sent the findings to Sobhraj. "He wrote back asking if it could fit into two suitcases. Twenty metres by 30 metres of balloon won't go into a suitcase, and there's also a metal burner that can't be squashed down." So his greatest ever prison escape was foiled long before it could take off. Confronted with all these fantastic stories, Dhondy did what many other writers would have done and turned them into a novel, published in India, entitled The Bikini Murders. It's about a serial killer who is arrested in Nepal for a couple of murders that took place years before. Sobhraj was not amused. He is obsessed with preventing anyone from exploiting his life for financial gain and threatened to sue the writer. The two men soon fell out. Sobhraj described Dhondy as a "petty middleman", while Dhondy called the threat to sue him "extortion and blackmail". Although they are no longer in contact, Sobhraj appears to have forgiven Dhondy, after the author was quoted as saying the killer's conviction in Nepal was unsound. In any case, Sobhraj, perhaps surprisingly, is not a man to bear a grudge. "He's not a revenge killer," says Dhondy.

This may be just as well because there is a law in Nepal that says when prisoners reach the age of 70 their sentence is cut in half. Sobhraj turned 70 in April, which means he has already served half his sentence, so in theory he would be free once more. For how long remains to be seen. The only certainty is that the Serpent will not slip away to a quiet retirement in the French countryside.