Thank You for This Moment

by Valérie Trierweiler

  When I reminded François during that bittersweet dinner that he always arbitrated against me when I tried to protect us, he admitted that he had been wrong. ‘I should have listened to you and understood what mattered.’

  But back to the kiss in Limoges – a long story I have to erase from my memory. It all started with a quarrel. One morning I found out that François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy were coming to Paris-Match to get their picture taken together for the cover of the magazine. They were also doing a joint interview ahead of the referendum on the European Constitution.

  I was dumbfounded. No one had told me. More specifically, neither my editor-in-chief nor Hollande had breathed a word about it to me. I had heard that the latter was frustrated at me for not going on a business trip to Lebanon with him, but to do a photo and interview of such scope with the newspaper I worked for without mentioning it to me when we were so close was unthinkable!

  Hollande’s press officer called me: ‘Valérie, what do you think you’re doing making him do this? It’s complete madness. A picture with Sarkozy, no less!’

  I explained that I had absolutely nothing to do with it and had only just found out myself. She asked me to convince him to change his mind. I tried. But when I called him he sent me packing: ‘You should have woken up earlier.’

  For the life of me I could not fathom why he was reacting this way, and his strategy confused me even further. Appearing alongside his number one political rival would do him no favours – especially when those who opposed the European Treaty were already accusing him of colluding with him.

  I packed up and left the magazine before he arrived. Tears clouded my vision as I sped down the motorway on my way home. I was baffled by my own tears. Were they the tears of a journalist who has just had her story ‘stolen’ or those of a woman who feels betrayed? Betrayal was already on the cards, even back then … I was still crying when I got home. I would later learn that François Hollande had asked for a tour of the magazine’s offices, including the canteen – in hopes of bumping into me.

  He tried to call me the next day but I hung up on him. This went on for several days. His press officer took over. I agreed to talk to her and I was stunned by how personal the conversation was.

  ‘Valérie, have you still not noticed that Hollande is madly in love with you? Talk to him, I’ve never seen him this unhappy.’

  I knew he was attracted to me, we had an undeniable bond, a very special friendship, a bit too close, deliciously borderline at times. But love? No. It seemed absurd. Forbidden.

  What she said came as a shock. I couldn’t say a word. A week went by without any contact between him and me. The situation was becoming difficult to manage. I was on the brink of asking to be taken off coverage of the Socialist Party. In the end, though, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I eventually agreed to a reconciliatory lunch. We spoke for hours and he ended up missing the train he was supposed to take that afternoon.

  One week later I agreed to accompany him on a business trip. The date was 14 April, the meeting was in Central France, near Châteauroux, I believe, though my recollection of the name of the town is blurry. We left Paris after lunch. I sat to his right in the backseat of the car. He wasn’t his usual self, less jokey. There were silences between us and a certain gravitas. As François Hollande’s loyal driver sped on, Hollande inched closer and took my hand. I was ill at ease but did not claim my hand back. A voice inside me whispered: ‘You are mad. It’s not too late to stop, take your hand back.’ But I did nothing of the sort.

  We talked and talked. Not about us. We talked politics, discussing the harm that the Paris-Match cover with Sarkozy had done. When we arrived we acted as if nothing had happened. Hollande’s meeting went well, he was as bright and funny as usual. He argued in favour of a ‘Yes’ vote in the EU referendum. We were on the same page. I felt confident about the outcome at the polling stations in December, but he was sceptical.

  That evening, Chirac appeared on a television show with young people in a bid to win them over to the European ideal. We watched the end of the show with a group of local elected representatives. It was a complete disaster: Chirac seemed completely out of touch with reality.

  Afterwards, we got back on the road. My hotel was in Limoges. Hollande had to push on until Tulle. He took my hand in the car again. It took about an hour to get to Limoges. Hollande asked if I would come with him to Tulle. I said I couldn’t, I had to leave very early the next morning for a meeting in Paris. Besides, I knew what ‘come to Tulle with me’ meant.

  We weren’t ready to say goodbye so we went to a café. He had a waffle and I had a crêpe, which we both washed down with a glass of wine. We spoke about our relationship for the first time. Our attraction to each other. It was all implied, nothing was said outright – as is his way. His tacit message was that he wasn’t interested in a fling: he intimated that he had real feelings. I confessed I was hardly indifferent either, adding that a relationship was out of the question – it was too dangerous for both of us. Simply impossible. Neither of us were free.

  He had to get back on the road to Tulle. We had to part ways. At least, that was what was planned. When it came to saying our goodbyes, everything between us changed dramatically without either of us fully grasping what was happening. What passed between us in that moment is indescribable, it was like a scene from a film. A kiss like no other kiss I’d ever shared with anyone. A kiss that had been held back for nearly fifteen years, in the middle of a crossroads.

  François did not drive back to Tulle that evening. He came with me to the station very early the next morning. We had just experienced a unique moment – and yet I struggled to call him by his first name or even simply to use the familiar ‘tu’ when addressing him. A halo of modesty separated us once again.

  Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Tuesday 6 May 2014

  I woke up in a damp hotel room. I had only slept for a few hours. I had arrived the previous day with a Secours populaire delegation. The organisation’s achievements abroad rarely get the recognition they deserve so the idea was to highlight its work in Haiti. When Secours populaire suggested the trip I was delighted. Delighted to be out on the field again, and equally delighted to be given an opportunity to skip town. Being away from Paris on the two-year anniversary of the election could only be a good thing. (Two years already … How time had flown!) I felt like a burns victim keen to avoid anything that reminded her of accident.

  I agreed to a radio interview about Secours populaire’s work. But when the team set the date for Tuesday 6 May I failed to notice immediately that this was two years to the day after François had been elected. When I realised, two days before the interview, that it was a significant date I told him about it. He did not ask me to cancel or postpone it. Nor did he mention that he also planned to speak on another radio station that morning. I found out about it in a news report the next morning.

  Once on the field, Paris was literally and figuratively miles away! Makeshift shelters crowded one another – tents and huts built from scrap, sheet metal and planks. Three hundred thousand Haitians still had nowhere to sleep since the earthquake. I did the interview at 4 a.m. Paris time. Stress started to build up ten minutes before it started. Someone offered me a rum to unwind, but I thought it would be wiser not to. I had decided what I would say the previous day and had prepared answers to the questions I imagined I would be asked. I suspected there would be a lot of personal questions.

  The journalist started out by talking about Haiti. And after a few minutes, he slipped in some questions about François Hollande. I did not want to be ungracious and merely wished him luck for his three remaining years as President. I had no interest in spoiling this political anniversary or detracting from the aim of my visit, which was to help Secours populaire.

  When I awoke a few hours later I checked the news reports, as I always did. I was astounded when I read François Hollande’s statement about what the press was calling ‘Gayetgate’. His answer to the qu
estion ‘Did you behave honourably?’ was: ‘You cannot suggest here that I would have behaved dishonourably. I have never taken the easy way out, I have never behaved in a way that could cause embarrassment, I have never given in to vulgarity in any shape or form, I have never been coarse.’

  François Hollande is a politician: he is fully in control of his rhetoric. He had carefully prepared that answer. His words had a devastating effect on me. Ever since we had separated three months earlier, he had been begging me to start over and resume our shared life. He had tried to see me. I had agreed. He had suggested dinner in that restaurant we liked. I had said yes.

  For three months he had been harping on that he had made a mistake and had lost his way. He was forever repeating that I was the only one he loved and that he had barely seen Julie Gayet. A fortnight after the AFP statement, he told me he regretted our separation. Just four days previously he had mentioned the possibility of rekindling our relationship. He sent me flowers at every opportunity, including when I was abroad. He swore undying love. Some days it touched me. His renewed flame weakened my resolve. The door opened a crack and for a second I was tempted to give in again. But I quickly shut that door. I had regained my freedom and I relished it. I could not forgive him. The separation had been too dramatic.

  Hearing him speak that way on the radio made those healing wounds on my heart bleed again. Perversely, the strength of the denial likened it to a confession. Not an ounce of regret transpired. He wanted me back but he was also stubbornly proud and incapable of expressing so much as a hint of remorse. A public apology was certainly not on the cards – no matter that he had promised me one. Merely saying my name in public was still difficult for him.

  ‘Honourable’. That was the word he used. Where is the honour in the stolen pictures of a President on the back of a scooter? In a President who keeps his helmet on inside the building to avoid being recognised? Was his indifference honourable? Was it honourable to sideline me and send me away to hospital? Was there honour in sending orders from above to increase my daily dose of sedatives? Where is the dignity in the statement ordaining my repudiation, a cold decree dictated to an AFP journalist?

  I DO NOT think he realised just how much damage his interview caused inside me. I was as stricken as on the darkest day of our separation. He plunged the blade in deeper still. Bitterness and anger made the wound fester.

  I thought I had managed to piece myself back together over the past few months. Further denial hurt me to the core. There I was, in tears again, and in less than an hour I had to meet with the Secours populaire team to visit a school in Rivière froide. Having travelled to the other side of the world, I had managed to leave François behind for a while, but sadness had somehow caught up with me again.

  I sent him a couple of text messages to get my anger off my chest. He was dumbfounded by my reaction and promised he would find the right words next time. Next time, always next time … I have lost count of the number of promises he has made and never held. Words clearly have no value for him.

  That morning he lost me for good.

  Once again I had to dry my tears, hide my pain and focus on what I had come to do in Haiti. My eyes were puffy when I went downstairs to meet the others. No matter, I could easily blame it on lack of sleep. And I had plenty of concealer to work with.

  We drove down potholed roads for half an hour in a big SUV – destitution was everywhere we looked. At the end of a road that was really more of a trail, we finally reached the school financed by Secours populaire aid. The Haitian children transported me to a whole other world, miles away from the betrayals and pettiness of politics. All around me were people who did not have the luxury to think of anything other than survival. Our heartaches and my heartbreak paled in comparison to their poverty. After the earthquake, Secours populaire was able to build a school for 1,500 children. Those were the luckier ones. They were saved.

  When we stopped at the drinking water treatment plant a group of street kids followed us. Some of them did not have shoes. They had no idea where I came from but they all wanted to hold my hand. For a moment, I forgot François. It was the children I was preoccupied with, those who would never be lucky enough to go to school. I thought, too, of my children, whom I had often left behind to go on assignments and trips. My boys, who paid the price for my complicated life. I felt so guilty! Nine years earlier I had sacrificed my family for a man who had got rid of me at the first opportunity. Had I been able to resist that love my children would have had an anonymous and protected childhood. Where once I was madly in love, now I was just mad. No one had ever imagined he would one day become President. Not even me.

  I felt like he had stolen everything from me. Nearly ten years of my life. Crossing the river exhausted me, I reached the other shore alone and covered in mud. How much longer would I feel sullied by all the qualifiers I had been saddled with: whore, the King’s mistress, manipulative, hysterical and so on? I had never felt that I was being defended. The person I had given everything to never said a word or lifted a finger to shield and protect me. Instead he fanned the flames and abandoned me.

  When I got back to Paris after Haiti I heard a very interesting radio show while I was driving: psychoanalysts were discussing introverts. One of them explained that it was a common mistake to confuse ‘introverted’ and ‘shy’. An introvert is not afraid of other people, an introvert is someone who is unable to turn his feelings towards the outside, he keeps them inside, keeps them to himself. ‘An introvert is sleek and smooth, shows no emotion. He wants to be more normal than the norm. It is a pathology.’

  I pulled up to the kerb to jot down the last sentences. I was stunned at just how well the description fitted François’ inability to show what he feels in public. I have seen a man besotted with me make grand statements proclaiming his love, but the same man shied away from public demonstrations of affection. You really had to know him to understand that the more he joked, the more he was trying to hide a vexation.

  I knew he was reluctant to talk about what is intimate, about truly personal things, and I hardly expected public introspection on the radio. I know he is simply incapable of such a thing. He could, however, have side-stepped the obstacle as he usually did; he is very good at being evasive. And he could have expressed regret. He chose instead to let his subconscious speak. He used the language of the powerful for whom anything goes and who does not owe a thing to anyone.

  I wondered whether he was aware he had wreaked havoc. His lies stung deeply and destroyed the simple but essential feeling we call trust. My compass was broken because of it.

  Since I have started writing I am flooded with memories every day. Today, I am remembering the day François was elected. That particular Sunday I was unable to embrace the joy that was all around us. He was intensely happy. I was not. I read in a beautiful book on Anne Pingeot – the woman François Mitterrand kept in the shadows, the woman who bore his illegitimate child – that on the day François Mitterrand was elected, she cried. She knew she was losing the man she loved. Oddly, when I recall that day, 6 May 2012, it is with Anne Pingeot that I identify, not Danielle Mitterrand – even though she was the woman who shared the President-elect’s life that evening.

  From politician to President – the change was almost instantaneous in François. Ahead of the results I barely managed to snatch thirty seconds for the two of us – to steal a brief kiss in the office of the Corrèze General Council. Then came that utterly surreal moment: the moment when the results were announced on television.

  He had been elected.

  François had become the President of France.

  I could hardly believe it. I could see that his score had come as a bit of a blow. He remained impassive but under his mask I could sense slight disappointment. The two main TV channels were reporting different figures so he was preparing for the less favourable score. There was cause for celebration in any case: the whole Corrèze team was there and we opened a bottle of champagne.

>   He only took a sip and went straight back to work on his statement. Aquilino Morelle, who was to become his special adviser, looked over his shoulder as François redrafted. There he was, erasing all the work he had been given and starting from scratch – as he always did.

  He was still rewriting his speech when I received a message from Nicolas Sarkozy’s communications adviser saying that Sarkozy was trying to get in touch with François, whose mobile could not cope with the number of incoming calls. It was on my mobile that they ended up talking. I felt that that conversation should not be public so before handing my mobile to François I asked everyone to step outside. It did not go down very well with quite a few people.

  Time was of the essence … The crowd that had gathered on the Cathedral Square in Tulle had been waiting for several hours already. I asked François to take a minute for a few commemorative pictures as it was a unique moment. This irritated François, who sent me packing in no uncertain terms. His reaction took me aback. It should have been a moment of happiness and it had just been spoiled.

  For me too, the tension had been very strong and was easing off. I broke down: I no longer felt able to go to the Cathedral Square. I locked myself up in the en suite bathroom and curled into myself on the cold tiles.

  I tried to understand what I was experiencing. Evidently two strong feelings had just exploded when they came into contact with one another. I was happy for him – he had achieved his life’s ambition but he was unable to share this emotion. If we could not be as one in moments like this, what would we ever be able to share? At that very moment I sensed that things would never be the same again.

  We had been so close, we had developed such a strong bond, but on his glory day I felt almost estranged from what he was experiencing. As I was going through all this in my head, someone came to bang on the door. Time to go. I hesitated, I thought of Cécilia Sarkozy, who was dragged to the Concorde on the evening her husband was elected – she had not wanted to go. Her reasons were different from mine. But the dizziness, the fear of what would unfold, was no doubt the same. How can you want that life – a life that will no longer belong to you?