REVENGE OF THE ROTTWEILER

SHE was the ferocious First Lady of France, ditched by priapic President Francois Hollande in favour of a young, pretty actress. On Saturday, in our first extract from her venomous memoirs, Valerie Trierweiler told how he lied about the affair and how she

May 2014. My phone vibrates: it’s yet another loving text from Francois Hollande, the president of France. The 12th I’ve received today. I’ve ignored all his other messages, but I cave in and answer this one. He responds immediately. Then it’s the whole song and dance act all over again, on an endless loop.

His onslaught of texts leaves me emotionally exhausted. So, yet again, I stop answering. Until the next time . . .

For weeks, Francois has been asking me every day to have dinner with him. Otherwise, his texts are all about missing me, about making amends, about how much he needs us to be together again.

Somehow, he even manages to keep track of my movements. Whether I’m staying in New york or Marrakech, I find flowers waiting for me in my hotel room and impassioned declarations of love.

Can I dare to believe he’s sincere? That I’m the only woman he wants in his life? That he’s truly changed?

Nearly four months have passed since Francois admitted to me that he’d been having a year-long affair with the young French actress Julie Gayet.

Four long months since I took an overdose of sleeping tablets in our private apartment at the Elysee Palace and had to be rushed to hospital.

Back then, he’d been cold and resolute, insisting that we announce our separation in a joint statement. But there was nothing joint about it: he broke my heart.

and now? Day after day, my love for him — once so wild and fierce — is waning. But I’ve yet to recover fully. When I go out, some people even say I look ‘radiant’. It’s all a front. I’ve been on medication for four months and there are days when I take a couple of sleeping pills and just stay in bed.

Commenting on what I’ve been through, a top psychiatrist told me: ‘I’ve rarely witnessed such a violent shock.’

Indeed, despite receiving expert treatment, I still occasionally break down. It can take only the smallest of triggers to remind me of the brutality of what I endured as First Lady of France. My anger against Francois intensifies. How could he have made such a mess of everything? Our relationship and the start of his five-year term.

Publicly, he’s become a laughing stock, with just 3 per cent saying they’d vote for him if he ran for president again in 2017. He’s officially France’s most unpopular president.

as Francois confides, he’s losing everything — and the last thing he wants to lose is me.

I’m his whole life, he says; he’s nothing without me and he’s determined to win me back.

He makes it sound as if I’m an election. Perhaps he believes that if he manages to get me back, he’ll also win back the hearts of the French people.

But, sadly, my trust in the man I once loved with such wild abandon has died. LEavING aside his affair with Gayet, I witnessed just how much he changed — almost into a different man — after becoming president.

Day after day, I saw him lose his humanity as he grew drunk on power. The truth is that power was like an acid: it corroded our love from the inside.

The signs were already there on election day, May 6, 2012. We were in a public building in his constituency, where a crowd had gathered outside, when news of his triumph was announced on Tv.

after he’d taken a call from the outgoing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, I asked Francois to take a minute to pose with me for a few commemorative pictures — but he reacted with irritation and sent me packing in no uncertain terms.

I was completely taken aback. What should have been a moment of happiness had just been spoiled. I’m afraid I broke down: I locked myself in the ensuite bathroom and curled up on the cold tiles.

already, I sensed that things would never be the same again.

LaTEr that day, when he delivered his speech in Paris, with me by his side, he walked right across the stage to kiss his former partner Segolene royal, the mother of his four children, who was there as a prominent Socialist politician.

Immediately, the cameras zoomed in, magnifying my crestfallen face on giant screens.

When Francois returned centrestage, I whispered in his ear that I wanted him to kiss me, adding ‘on the mouth’. yes, I did want the difference to be clear. I’d felt reduced to nothing when he kissed Segolene.

Not for a second did I imagine that the Press would read the words on my lips — and present them as evidence that I was a ‘domineering woman’.

I should have understood then that this new world was not made for me. I’m a spontaneous person from a working-class background; I’ve always been forthright.

The political elite, on the other hand, is used to subterfuge: you greet those you despise with a wide smile and malign them behind their backs.

So I was ill-prepared for life as First Lady in the Elysee Palace. Particularly when it became clear that success was driving the man I loved away from me. Much of the time, he kept me at arm’s length; indeed, his indifference was often more than I could bear.

In fairness, sometimes — when he thought I looked beautiful — he’d suddenly be t ender again. Then he’d look at me with shiny eyes, furtively take my hand in public — just as he used to — and pay me sincere compliments on my appearance.

The only thing he disapproved of was the height of my heels — he couldn’t stand me being taller than him.

But there’s no denying that during his first weeks in power, his feelings for me seemed to undergo a drastic reversal.

Just before a state dinner, after complimenting me on my outfit, he suddenly asked: ‘Does it take you a long time to be so beautiful?’ ‘a bit of time, yes,’ I replied. ‘Then again, it’s not like you have anything better to do.’

as I was involved in humanitarian work as First Lady and also reviewing books for the news magazine ParisMatch, I assumed he was joking. But he wasn’t; he stared at me, cold and unsmiling. In his view, I was there only to make him look good.

On another occasion, he barked: ‘Go get changed! Get dressed!’ because he thought my dress was too sexy. reluctantly, I agreed to wear a wrap over my bare shoulders, but I drew the line at that.

Slowly but surely, his cutting remarks were making me lose every last scrap of self-confidence.

One day, I mentioned I’d bumped into Cecilia — the former wife of Nicolas Sarkozy — at a grand dinner, and that in front of Bill Clinton she’d told me: ‘Without you, Hollande would never have been elected.’

FraNCOIS froze. His reply was scathing: ‘If it makes you happy to believe that you had something to do with it . . .’ I kept my cool: ‘Some people think so, at any rate, even though it embarrasses you.’

Did our love still mean anything to him? I remember him being furious about a picture of the two of us on a magazine cover. ‘you take up all the space!’ he shouted.

Then, six months after his election, a favourable article about me — one of the few — came out in the newspaper Le Monde. But when Francois read it, he flew into a violent rage.

I burst into tears. It was only later that I realised he considered Le Monde ‘ his’ newspaper — that it should only write about him. Deep down, Francois wanted me to take a step back, to be invisible.

Not that I was invisible as far as the media was concerned. Two books about me were published: one called The Troublemaker and the other The King’s Mistress. Then a colleague at Paris- Match cruelly dubbed me Hollande’s ‘rottweiler’.

I felt besmirched, as if I were drowning. There I was being saddled with vile nicknames, yet Francois’s initial response was pure indifference.

Later, when we were alone, he’d bring up my ‘negative image’. He was worried it would become contagious and affect him; all he could think about was himself.

‘What about me?’ I said to him, recalling how low he was in the polls when we first got together. ‘ Do you remember what your image was like when I fell in love with you? Had I looked no further than your popularity, I’d never have loved you.’

Nothing I said seemed to make any difference. When Nelson Mandela became critically ill and I told Francois that I wanted to attend his funeral, he said cuttingly: ‘I don’t see why you should be there.’

So I told him I’d pay for my flight myself and go as a journalist.

Then after Mandela died, Francois changed his mind and said I could come after all.

I l ater l earned, however, that diplomats had i nsisted on my presence because most other heads of states were taking their spouses.

There was another blow, just before we set out to catch our flight for South africa. Francois announced that he was thinking of asking Sarkozy to ride in his car to the airport, while I followed in another.

I bit back: ‘Do you think he would have stood Carla up for you?’

My answer left him speechless; I rode in his car with him. But Francois ignored me at the funeral — to him, Sarkozy was the only person who mattered.

Soon they were chatting away and