Why I took 10 years to marry my ex-pupil, by Mrs Macron
AS high school romances go, Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron’s is out of the ordinary.
The pair met when the future French president, then a bright 15year-old, fell for his friend’s mother – who happened to be his drama teacher, Madame Brigitte Auziere.
The romance between the 40-year-old married mother of three and her teenage student caused something of a stir in the Amiens region of northern France where they lived.
But the couple defied the doubters of their quarter- century age gap when they married in 2007, with the civil servant approaching his 30th birthday and his bride aged 54.
However, the French first lady claimed the pair would have wed a decade earlier had they not been concerned about the potential embarrassment it would cause her children from her first marriage to banker Andre-Louis Auziere.
Her son is now 48 – three years older than her statesman husband – while her daughters are 46 and 39. But all would have been in their late teens and early twenties had the pair married in 1997.
In a rare interview about her personal life, she told French magazine Paris Match: ‘The only obstacle was my children. I took time so I would not wreck their lives. That lasted ten years, the time to put them on the rails.
‘You can imagine what they were hearing. But I didn’t want to miss out on my life. I do not know how my parents, who were the model of fidelity and good education, would have reacted.’
And the pair’s fledgling romance was almost nipped in the bud by Mr Macron’s upper-class parents, who sent him to Paris for his sixth-form studies in an attempt to stymie their nascent relationship.
‘I told myself that he would fall in love with someone his age,’ Mrs Macron said. ‘It didn’t happen.’
She teaches in adult education, though her duties as first lady since her husband became president in 2017 regularly place her in illustrious company including King Charles and Queen Camilla, and Donald and Melania Trump – who themselves have a 24-year age gap.
She told Paris Match: ‘When the royal couple came I was worried. But right from their arrival at the Arc de Triomphe, when Camilla got out of the car and kissed me, they set the tone.
‘He is very polished, very cultivated, very funny. What sums them up is their delicacy.’ And she described Mrs Trump as ‘very sweet’, and said she ‘keeps a firm hand on her husband’.
‘Fall in love with someone his age’