Danielle Mitterand, widow of French president François Mitterand, met in a shack deep in the Mexican jungle with Marxist guerrilla Subcomandante Marcos. The pipe-smoking rebel wore his mask throughout his meeting with the former French first lady, but as Ms. Mitterand recounts in the Sunday Times of London, she could still peer into his eyes, which are "deep brown and flecked with gold." His voice was "both powerful and soft," and the mask made Marcos "more timeless, disincarnate." He gave her a paper rose, which she now keeps in her bedroom. Clarifying her motives, Ms. Mitterand said she had come to Chiapas to escape the "dictatorship of money," which the Zapatista rebels countered with an alternative way of living.

Marcos later convened an international meeting of "humanity against neo-liberalism," held in La Realidad, Mexico, that the Associated Press called a "Woodstock for Guerrillas." Leftists from as far away as Turkey and the University of Texas at Austin came to discuss "alternatives to the world's free-market system." Ms. Mitterand also attended the event, wading through ankle-deep mud.

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