Thank You For This Moment: A Story Of Love, Power And Betrayal LA FEMME FATALE ET PRESIDENT MAGOO: C’EST INCROYABLE!
Biteback€28 Valérie Trierweiler
It is often said that the French are more passionate than their European counterparts when it comes to les affaires d’amour. This book suggests otherwise. Who wrote this, for instance? ‘My only joy was in talking and making love late, hours of it, several of those evenings etched in time, memorable, wanting time to stand still, just a little while longer... my lover who now soars in skies above.’
From its lyrical romanticism, it seems typically French. But no: it’s Edwina Currie writing about her affair with John Major.
And what of this rather more mathematical approach to love? ‘ Twenty-nine. I counted them: he sent me 29 text messages yesterday.’ Yes, it’s the twice-married, twice-divorced femme fatale Valérie Trierweiler, who, as the President’s official partner, briefly enjoyed the position of First Lady of France.
This all came to an end, you may remember, when President Hollande was snapped last January walking into a sexy actress’s apartment block wearing a motorbike helmet, in the hope he wouldn’t be recognised.
‘In just a few hours... my life was devastated and my future shattered into a million tiny pieces,’ writes Valérie in this sour little book. Valérie certainly lacks the French gift for sangfroid: on virtually every page, tears stream down her face, her future is shattered, she is thrown to the sharks or stabbed through the heart. There is something theatrical about it all, something camp and unfelt.
‘I had dropped a bomb and it had exploded in my face,’ is a typical sentence. If I hadn’t seen the name of the author, I might have imagined it was the autobiography of a circus clown, perhaps the driver of one of those exploding comedy cars.
Yes, it’s crash, bang, wallop all the way! At one point, Valérie somehow even manages to make her internal organs perform acrobatics: I had my heart in my mouth – perhaps quite literally so.’
Upon hearing of the imminent publication of the photographs of the president and actress Julie Gayet, Valérie confronts him. François first claims the affair has been going only a month, but she keeps pressing him. ‘From one month, we reached three, then six, nine, and finally a year.’ The maths is unanswerable, so he puts his head in his hands and says: ‘What are we going to do?’
President Hollande is a bore and a bully. He makes her cry, bombards her with texts and insults her family. And slowly it dawns on Valérie Trierweiler that she’s become France’s Second Lady. Cue one very sour little book of revenge...
Valérie has a sleepless night before switching on the TV at 5am to watch the news unfold. She finds she can’t take it any more and grabs a bag of pills. François snatches it from her. The pills tumble onto the bed and across the floor. ‘I managed to grab a few of them and swallowed what I could. All I wanted was to sleep – I could not bear to live through the next few hours.’
She is rushed to hospital. When she comes to, she threatens to leave if she isn’t given back her two mobile phones: she is nothing if not forceful. After five days, François finally puts his head around the door, only to suggest a separation. ‘I could not understand his logic,’ protests Valérie. ‘He was the one caught red-handed and I was the one to pay the price... I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me whole.’
He drafts a separation statement. It goes down like a cold blancmange. ‘Eighteen cold and proud words on a small piece of paper, each of them like a stab in the heart.’ Eighteen! Does she never stop counting? She turns on him. ‘Go on then! Send your bloody statement if that’s what you want!’
Wonderfully insensitive to atmosphere, François judges the time might be right for un petit peu de legover. He suggests one last night together, and leans over for a kiss. But Valérie is not playing ball. ‘I tore myself from his arms forcefully and left without turning back, tears streaming down my face... That evening, I truly understood the meaning of the expression “crying your eyes out”.’
The two first met way back in 1988, when she was a young journalist in her 20s, and he was a senior French socialist politician. What was the attraction of François Hollande? Valérie says a number of times he made her laugh, and there is certainly something comical about his appearance: one part Mr Magoo to two parts Sgt Bilko.
She insists that for years their friendship was purely professional. But then in 2000, they were surprised in a restaurant by François’s long-time partner and mother of his four sons, Ségolène Royal. Her demeanour, says Valérie, was ‘ice cold’. ‘Caught red-handed,’ says Ségolène. ‘Not at all,’ says Valérie. ‘We were talking about the Tour de France.’ ‘Stop taking me for a fool!’ Ségolène storms out, and François runs after her. Her suspicion was unjustified, says Valérie, but ‘ she had instinctively picked up a danger I had not sensed myself... I was blind, I could not see the love that was blossoming between us.’
One thing leads to another, and before long Valérie has taken Ségolène’s place, having jettisoned her own husband, an editor at Paris Match called Denis who was ‘handsome and intelligent but’ – you won’t be surprised to learn – ‘had an inner darkness’.
Things get off to a roaring start. ‘How could I forget those first few years of passion with François? That once-in-a-lifetime passion that devours everything.’ But the moment François becomes president, he becomes ‘simultaneously simultaneously a different per-
son’. On the big day, she begs him to pose with her for commemorative photos. ‘This irritated François, who sent me packing in no uncertain terms.’ His frosty reaction takes her aback. ‘I broke down... I locked myself up in the en suite bathroom and curled into myself on the cold tiles.’
Worse follows. On the victory platform, François spots Ségolène and strides over to kiss her. ‘I lost my composure,’ confesses Valérie. ‘When he returned centre stage I whispered in his ear that I wanted him to kiss me, adding “on the mouth”... Not for one second did I imagine that the press would read those words on my lips – and publish them.’
From now on, it’s downhill all the way. Though Valérie is officially France’s First Lady, François barely bothers to see her any more. When he does, he invariably flies into a rage and she bursts into tears. ‘He did not have a kind word for me... His cutting remarks make me lose every last scrap of self-confidence.’
Before long, it becomes clear that though she may be France’s First Lady, she is only François’s second. Amid all these explosions, they split up. She goes on medication and, a few weeks later, she starts writing this book. Against all the usual serving suggestions, it’s a dish presented piping hot. ‘As days go by,
‘Not a day goes by without him begging for my forgiveness and asking me to start over’
my anger against François grows.’ And how!
Thank You For This Moment swings back and forth between the past and the present, with the most recent entries (‘he has become a laughing stock once more’) written in July of this year. This gives it a squirm-inducing topicality, particularly as, if she is to be believed, François ‘continues to harass me with text messages... His messages talk of love. He writes that I am his whole life, that he is nothing without me. Not a day goes by without him begging for my forgiveness and asking me to start over.’ She even claims that he asked her to marry him in June. Let’s hope he hasn’t pre-ordered the wedding cake.
This book may finally convince him that, frankly, she’s not all that keen on him any more. In fact, rather the opposite; in alphabetical order, she sees him as a blunderer, a bore, a bully, a cold fish, a hypocrite and a snob. And what of Valérie’s own character? At one point, she recalls taking François to a Christmas dinner with 25 members of her family. ‘ After dinner, François turned to me and said with a snicker: “Well, the Massoneaus certainly ain’t a pretty bunch.” ’
It was, she says, ‘like a slap in the face’, though this hasn’t stopped her retelling it for everyone to enjoy. ‘I was reluctant to tell that anecdote because it is hurtful to my family,’ explains Valérie, ‘...But I want to wash away so many lies.’ Just in case the poor old Massoneaus haven’t registered the insult, she then repeats: ‘I want to apologise to you, my family, for having fallen in love with a man who could snigger about the Massoneaus not being “a pretty bunch”.’
I doubt the Massoneaus will be asking President Hollande for dinner this Christmas. And I suspect Valérie’s invitation may remain unposted, too.