In the end, it is the shoes that will trip up Roland Dumas Not legally perhaps His trial is less than half over. It is possible, on the evidence presented so far, that he will be acquitted. But one unforgettable detail -the £1,100 pair of shoes, bought for him by his mistress - will destroy Mr Dumas' carefully crafted public image as a Socialist statesman, a teenage resistance hero, a man who overcame obscure and tragic beginnings (his father was shot by the Nazis) to rise to the highest counsels of the law and the state. The 78-year-old former Socialist foreign minister - a fragile, flamboyant, brilliant, arrogant man - is on trial in Paris, accused of embezzling large sums from the state-owned oil company Elf in the years 1989-93. It is alleged that Mr Dumas pulled strings to secure the appointment of a new president for Elf. In return, his mistress, Christine Deviers-Joncour - later to entitle herself the "Whore of the Republic" - was given a job with the company Her only duties appear to have been to meet Mr Dumas. For this she was paid £6.4m by Elf over four years.Some of this largesse was, the prosecution alleges, intended for Dumas.

There is documentary evidence that Ms Deviers-Joncour bought him a pair of Berluti hand-made shoes for Fr11,000 (£1,100) with her unlimited Elf credit card. Otherwise, the direct evidence that Dumas received a centime of Elf money is thin.Mr Dumas made his name in the 1960s and 1970s as a trial lawyer for artistic and left-wing causes (his clients included Pablo Picasso). During the first three days of the trial last week, Mr Dumas virtually conducted his own defence, denying all charges, appealing for respect for his "honour" and his place in "history". In passing, he flung out, almost unnoticed, another startling fact about the Berluti shoes. Did anyone believe that you could buy a statesman with a pair of shoes? he asked.

He had, of course, immediately refunded Ms Deviers-Joncour the £1,100. "In any case, I had four other pairs of them." That makes five pairs all together.Pause for a moment and place the shoes in context. All this was happening in the period 1989-93, when the French economy was struggling, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, when Germany was uniting. The Socialist president, François Mitterrand, had been elected 10 years earlier promising a new political and economic dawn Since then, unemployment had nearly doubled. Mitterrand's foreign minister and close friend, Roland Dumas, was walking around in a pair - in several pairs - of £1,100 shoes.Whatever the outcome of the trial (it has three more weeks to run), Mr Dumas' shoes will be fixed forever as the emblem of the arrogance, excess and hypocrisy of the Mitterrand years. Shoes apart, the trial has everything you would need to construct an airport novel: money, oil, political and sexual intrigue, and a key defendant on the run (protected, it is rumoured, by the French security services, who are supposed to be looking for him).