Thank You for This Moment

by Valérie Trierweiler

  I left Angers, my underprivileged banlieue and my family – on the very day the baccalaureate results were published. The next day, I enrolled for a history degree at Nanterre University. I was moving from a small town to Parisian life; from a school in a building listed as a national heritage site to a suburban university that was a hotbed for the May ’68 uprisings; from life at home with my family to a bohemian couple life in a shoebox attic room. Two years later, my father died.

  François Hollande heard my backstory early on. Even though I was the journalist who was supposed to get him to confide in me and share some political secrets, he was very good at making other people talk. He would sometimes tease me good-humouredly by calling me Cinderella over those first few years when we only saw each other once in a while. I struck him as lacking self-confidence and all in all very different from my colleagues. Because I did not like to put myself forward I acquired a reputation as a cold and haughty woman – a reputation which has stuck. At the National Assembly and at Paris-Match I was often portrayed as a bourgeoise. It amused me – me, the girl from Monplais’, in a northern banlieue of Angers.

  I was simply not like them, whatever they may have thought – the differences were blatantly obvious. I started dressing differently from other young people as soon as I could. I did not want to be the pauper, I wanted to be elegant and stand out. For years my youngest sisters and I only wore hand-me-downs from our older sisters. We had ‘Sunday clothes’ (itchy flannel trousers) which my grandmother had cut out of my father’s trousers.

  One of my worst memories is having to wear my brother’s ‘clodhoppers’ to primary school. My shoes must have broken that day and my mother hadn’t found an alternative solution. I refused to go to school wearing them. In the end, I wasn’t given a choice and cried all the way to school. I sat in a corner during the break – not moving an inch, my feet hidden under my satchel.

  Most of my colleagues waiting outside the Council of Ministers or in the Four Columns Hall at the National Assembly wore jeans. I wore skirt suits. Even at Nanterre University I wore skirts and retro jackets I bought at bargain prices at the Saint-Ouen flea market. My look merely reinforced my reputation as a hardened and disdainful young woman. Few of my colleagues dared approach me.

  I gradually made friends with other journalists. Some of my colleagues used me as ‘bait’ – in their own words. I became part of a group of only male journalists. We took politicians – male and female – out for lunch. We were new to the job so we joined forces. During one of those lunches I learned a very valuable lesson. A Cabinet reshuffle was taking place the following day and a centrist politician swore to us that he would never join Mitterrand’s Cabinet. Three days later he was appointed a minister. I called him immediately and said, ‘I wanted to thank you. Because of you I know that you should never believe a politician.’ I should have remembered that…

  In 1997 when Lionel Jospin was appointed Prime Minister, François Hollande became the Socialist Party’s First Secretary. We had developed a strong bond and were growing closer. He made me laugh. His intelligence and sharp mind amazed me. He got from A to B so quickly! It didn’t matter what the question was, he always had a quick answer that made perfect sense and was invariably witty. Our closeness amused some of my colleagues. They stayed close to me at the National Assembly, convinced that the First Secretary would make his remarks to me first. He did so without fail. And so my colleagues winked away merrily when he walked through the National Assembly towards our little group.

  He would often call me on Mondays when Paris-Match wrapped on the grounds that I might need some piece of information or other – even though I had not tried to contact him. He also called me on Saturday afternoons when he was in Corrèze. He tipped me off but I also shared information with him because I knew the Socialist Party well.

  As years went by our bond grew stronger. One election weekend I was covering him with a photographer in Corrèze. On Saturday evening he had dinner with us. Afterwards he had to attend a ball for elderly people. He decided to ride with us rather than with his driver. I drove because my photographer wanted to be able to get out as quickly as possible – as soon as there was a picture to take. ‘Hollande’ – that was what I called him then, I even still used the formal ‘vous’ – sat in the front with me. I was not much used to driving back then. My stiletto heels were too high and would be a nuisance for the clutch. So I took them off as soon as we got into the car and plonked them into his hands. François never forgot that.

  Once we got to the ball he did his bit and danced with the little old ladies. I looked on, amused. He looked much less so. He was holding in his arms a lady who was in her eighties. I knew full well that it was not what he wanted at that particular moment.

  The Jospin years (1997–2002) brought us closer together. We talked politics for hours on end. Before the summer holidays, late July, we had gotten into the habit of having lunch together so he could tell me about his plans for September.

  In 2000, he took me out for lunch in the garden of the Maison de l’Amérique Latine. I was convinced that Jean-Pierre Chevènement would resign from his role as Minister of the Interior over a disagreement with Jospin about the Corsica issue. François Hollande, who was still the First Secretary of the Socialist Party, did not share my point of view. Barely a month later I was vindicated.

  There we were, the two of us good-humouredly discussing this and that, when suddenly I saw Ségolène Royal heading straight for our table. When I told François – who had his back to the entrance of the restaurant – he thought I was joking. Until she sat down at our table. Her demeanour was ice-cold: ‘Caught red-handed. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.’

  François couldn’t say a word. I was the one who answered, ‘Not at all, we were talking about the Tour de France.’

  ‘Stop taking me for a fool!’

  ‘I’m perfectly serious. It’s true. Besides, we weren’t doing anything wrong. We are not in a hotel, are we?’

  My aplomb irritated and impressed her in equal measures.

  She turned to him and said: ‘You never take me to places like this.’

  It was a heated discussion. If one-sided: François didn’t pipe a word. He was embarrassed by her making a scene. Eventually she got up and left as quickly as she had come – before things took a turn for the worse.

  ‘It’s not always easy for me, you know,’ François said in a weak voice.

  ‘Either way, you had better run after her,’ I answered.

  He thanked me and left. I stayed at the table alone, completely stunned by the whole ludicrous situation. Alone with a bill I would be paying off for a long time. Ségolène Royal’s suspicion struck me as completely unjustified, let alone turning up unannounced at the restaurant. I now understand her. She had instinctively picked up on a danger I had not sensed myself.

  The presidential campaign was drawing nearer. We continued to see each other in a strictly professional context. At least, I convinced myself that was the case.

  He offered to help me write the narrative of the campaign – the deal was that we would meet regularly and he would share the hidden agenda of politics with me. I turned the offer down immediately. I sensed that I needed to maintain some distance between us. I enjoyed his company, he enjoyed mine. Our closeness was not quite normal and I felt that I needed to protect myself.

  We saw each other rarely during Lionel Jospin’s presidential campaign but we spoke on the phone frequently. I followed Jospin closely, travelling across France on his campaign trail. I built strong friendships with some of my colleagues during that period, namely Patrice Biancone, who followed me to the Élysée. François Hollande envied us journalists for being involved in those moments. He envied us for being a part of the excitement surrounding the favourite in the presidential election. Meanwhile, he held his meetings separately and few journalists covered him. I bumped into him at Jospin’s major regional meetings – the only ones he attended.

  O
n 21 April 2002, Lionel Jospin lost the presidential race in the first round, with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right leader, coming in second, after Jacques Chirac. It was a major upheaval. That evening, the campaign HQ, l’Atelier, was a picture of bleakness and dejection. I tried and failed to hide my tears. I was filled with the same despair and anger as everyone around me.

  The crowd of despondent party members scattered. It was gone midnight. I went for a drink with a group of journalists. We discussed the title I had found for one of my articles about the defeated candidate: ‘Élysée or Isle of Rhé for Jospin?’ Unlike many of my colleagues, I was not surprised when Jospin announced he would retire from politics on the very evening of his defeat. François Hollande was gobsmacked by my clairvoyance. Hollande livened up the evening by making us all laugh. He chose to face a tragic situation with humour – as was his habit. Humour was his shield, his mask. Suddenly the laughter stopped: Ségolène Royal had just arrived. Hollande’s persona changed immediately. He left with her. But he turned back for one last look at me. That one look left me inexplicably flustered.

  That dark day, 21 April 2002, when the far-right party Front National outscored the Socialist Party was traumatising for my group of journalist friends – as it was of course for all of the members of the Socialist Party. Hollande was on the front line and granted me the first interview about the lessons to be learned from this catastrophe. We were alone in his office. He sat very close to me but I discreetly changed seats. Later, he would often remind me of how ill at ease I was with him.

  We continued to talk very frequently. It was then that the first rumours of an affair between us started. I wasn’t worried about it. Everyone knew my situation: my children and my husband, who also worked at Paris-Match. The closeness between François Hollande and me was anything but news – there had been no change there.

  I was not yet aware of the electromagnetic field that sparked between the two of us as soon as we were together. From the outside it was obvious that something was going on. But I was blind, I could not see the love that was blossoming between us. Granted, there was a very real bond between us. Possibly even a friendship between a man and a woman that was tinged with seduction. But no more than that.

  Some time later Ségolène Royal came to talk to me in the Hall of the Four Columns at the National Assembly: ‘I would like to meet with you.’

  ‘Of course, when?’

  ‘Saturday.’

  ‘No, not Saturday, I’ll be with my children, I don’t work on Saturdays.’

  ‘Monday nine o’clock then.’

  Her tone suffered no discussion.

  When we met in her office at the National Assembly she greeted me frostily: ‘You do know why I wanted to see you?’

  I did not let her intimidate me. I had nothing to feel ashamed about.

  ‘I think I could hazard a guess.’

  ‘So you know about the rumour,’ she said.

  I did. But rumours had always circulated about everyone and everything and they always would – especially between male politicians and journalists. It was no reason to credit them.

  She seemed surprised by my composure and the authority with which I spoke. She mellowed somewhat and asked me how to prevent this false information from spreading. I suggested a dinner as a foursome – my husband, François Hollande and her – in a well-known restaurant, and she did not seem opposed to the idea. As for my husband, he knew about the whole business: I had always told him everything, I had nothing to hide from him.

  The following day I left for a three-day trip to India covering Jean-Pierre Raffarin’s official visit as France’s new Prime Minister. When I got home, my husband told me that Ségolène Royal had called him and asked to meet. She had gone too far this time. I went straight to my office at Paris-Match to call her: ‘What are you playing at? You’re the one who is in the public eye, not me. You are the one who is taking risks by accrediting a rumour, not me. See him if you feel like it, you’ll see he’s a charming man.’

  Until then, I had not really considered a romantic relationship with François Hollande. The intervention of a woman who feared our love above all else no doubt played a part in it becoming a possibility in my eyes. Not that I had consciously understood that yet – it was still a blur in my mind.

  AT THE TIME of writing, Ségolène Royal has just been integrated in the Cabinet as Minister for the Environment. Blast from the past: as the news made a point of reminding us, she had already been given that portfolio twenty-two years earlier in Pierre Bérégovoy’s government. The same year, she had given birth to her youngest daughter.

  That year, 1992, I was also pregnant – with my first son. Paris-Match assigned me on an interview with her at the maternity ward. I knew that François Hollande and his press officer were against it. I told the magazine they shouldn’t count on it – Ségolène Royal was sure to say no. I had barely got home from work when my landline rang. It was my editor-in-chief and he was beyond furious: ‘For your information Ségolène Royal has just let TF1 cameras into her room at the maternity ward. You’d better secure an interview too.’

  I couldn’t believe it. I did as I was told and called the hospital switchboard. I was put straight through to Ségolène Royal and asked her if I could get some pictures. She agreed in exchange for an interview on the environment. The picture was taken without me being there and we did the interview by fax; I wrote the piece without us ever meeting. I certainly did not barge into her personal space to steal the father of her children – as was printed later, when our entire story was rewritten, twisted and endlessly reinterpreted. How could anyone imagine I would hatch such a Machiavellian plan when I was pregnant with my first child and had never been happier?

  The following year I gave birth to my second child, and got married before the third one was born. I had no other plans than to build both my personal life and my career – François Hollande was not part of either of these plans. I even changed my surname. I wanted to be called Trierweiler. I wanted to show that I belonged to my husband. I will admit that the attacks hurt me because they touched on what was most precious to me.

  While Ségolène Royal worried about rumours, the Socialist Party’s debacle in 2002 sent me a little further to the right professionally speaking. I was often asked to cover President Chirac’s trips. At first I sensed that the staff in the Élysée’s press office was wary of me but gradually I gained their trust. Even though Paris-Match’s ‘yellow pages’ – the politics pages – were now considerably less interested in the Socialist Party, I did not abandon ship.

  François Hollande and I had lunch once in a while – either alone or with other journalists. I had moved out of Paris with my family and he often ‘saw me to the door over the phone’: we would chat as I drove home even when it was very late. We never ran out of things to talk about.

  With the 2004 regional elections fast approaching, politics were current affairs again.

  Hollande had earned his stripes thanks to the Socialist Party’s sweeping victory. The weekly newspaper Le Point made him ‘man of the year’. Because Hollande was at the forefront of the regional campaign, I travelled hundreds of miles with him. For the first and only time, I wrote a positive article about him. I remember a comment the Paris-Match editor-in-chief made: ‘So now you’re tagging along behind Hollande.’

  2014…

  Late afternoon on rue Cauchy, spring is only a few days away. I am home, just like every day – or nearly – since I left the Élysée. The bay window is wide open, the sun warming the entire living room. I am working with my laptop on my knees. Earlier, I received a call from my former security officer who has an envelope to deliver. He arrives within half an hour. It is a beautiful bouquet of white and pink roses – exactly what I like. They are from François. He has not forgotten the date. This very morning he sent me a message: ‘Nine years ago, the kiss in Limoges.’

  Barring the pictures of the President with his helmet on, Julie Gayet, the statement, the
whole mad situation, yes, it would have been our nine-year anniversary. But our relationship died before it turned nine. Still, if our love had a name that would be it: ‘The Kiss in Limoges’. It is our very own legend. It was a Thursday, 14 April 2005. That date will always mean something to me.

  Nine years later I agreed to go to dinner with him – for the second time since our separation – despite the fact that there was no anniversary left to celebrate. We spent the evening in an Italian restaurant in our neighbourhood, where we used to go when we lived together. The President and the First Lady were no more – no more grievances or recriminations, just a poignant mixture of joy and sadness. It felt like a huge waste. An irreparable waste. That evening, 279 Nigerian young women, aged twelve to seventeen, were kidnapped by the Islamist sect Boko Haram. We heard about it the following day.

  François said he wished he had better protected our privacy. It certainly wasn’t for want of trying on my part – I fought a losing battle to preserve our intimacy. With him, nothing and no one was off limits. Keeping people at a distance was not something he was good at.

  I remember watching, aghast, as the President walked through our bedroom one evening with his PR adviser in tow. They were headed for the bathroom, which would have been turned into a makeshift meeting room had I not intervened. I threw the PR adviser out, outraged by such a lack of boundaries.

  His security officers would also sometimes slip in between us and join in our conversation … I cannot remember how many times I had to ask them to give us a bit of space when we were out having a walk. It got to the point where I sometimes preferred to go home than have to put up with their presence. I even caught one of the croissant couriers sat on our bed, supposedly to fix the television channels.