Thank You for This Moment

by Valérie Trierweiler

  I remember our first holiday in 2007, an unforgettable holiday in the south of France and in Italy. The following years we holidayed in Spain or Greece. From Athens to Syros, Mykonos and Paros, we behaved like a couple of teenagers, roaming the islands on rental scooters without helmets. We did not know where we would sleep from night to night.

  Back then, François still knew how to waste time. We were very close, he could make me laugh over absolutely anything and drove me mad by insisting on driving in the middle of nowhere on a nearly empty petrol tank. I trusted him blindly regardless. He could have taken me anywhere, I would have followed him to the ends of the earth. The only thing that mattered to me was to be with him – wherever he was.

  What we shared was unique and unbreakable. Eternal. We could happily spend weeks with only each other for company – there was never a dull moment. He would often repeat: ‘I love you because you are a funny lady.’ I will admit that later on in our relationship that was not quite so apparent. But I am also certain that he drew a newfound strength from that period which allowed him to overcome the obstacles he later came across.

  During that period, I also took François to the banlieues, which he did not know well, having won the rural vote. Wearing a cap and sunglasses, he came with me to those discount shops offering a wide range of articles with fast-approaching sell-by dates.

  I wanted him to be familiar with the daily lives of some French citizens who count every single euro and worry about how to make ends meet – every month.

  He was the sort of person who would rather not have a meal if it was not first-rate; he did not eat my strawberries unless they were tasty French ‘gariguettes’; he did not eat potatoes unless their origin was ‘Noirmoutier’; and he wouldn’t think twice about binning meat if it had been purchased vacuum-packed. He hardly knew the cost of living. I was always hearing him say ‘that’s a fair price’ for food or articles that were hideously overpriced!

  At that time I was making a good living. Even though I incurred heavy costs with the children, I enjoyed a certain financial security. Regardless, I simply could not abide buying something when the price seemed excessive. The difference in our social backgrounds was glaring. He teased me gently, nicknaming me Cosette. He did not understand my hang-up with money. He had never wanted for anything so the notion was completely foreign to him. He wanted the best of everything and only the very best. He enjoyed dining out in fancy restaurants, while I favoured bistros; he was a luxury hotel sort of man, while I was happy with a simple inn.

  Not that he was a big spender. In fact he cared very little about his appearance. He would happily buy his shirts and socks in supermarkets. When Ségolène Royal had his luggage couriered to the Socialist Party HQ in June 2007, after their official separation, I sorted through his clothes. I donated most of his clothes to the French charity shop Emmaüs, including the threadbare black velvet suit he loved so much and his leather jackets. I permanently banished his short-sleeved shirts from the wardrobe and we went shopping for a new wardrobe for him.

  Three years later, after he had lost nearly two and a half stone in weight, I did the same thing again. I gave away his suits and shirts. He could wear them again today, now that he has put the weight back on, but it is too late: other men – men who shop at Emmaüs – are unknowingly walking around Paris in suits that used to belong to the French President.

  Seven years ago, I was going through the luggage Ségolène Royal had filled with his suits. Today it is my turn to box up his things, pack his clothes into suitcases, and have it all delivered to the Élysée Palace… ‘Every man for himself / In the bustle of life’, as Jeanne Moreau used to sing.

  May 2014

  When I fell in love with François he was polling at 3 per cent, he was the butt of jokes. Now that he is the President he is back at 3 per cent, his score when we were at our happiest.

  At the moment, in a bid to relive our past, he constantly sends me love messages. He says he needs me. Not an evening goes by without him asking me to have dinner with him. I know he is suffering from the failure of his mandate so far. It is not for want of relentless work, seven days a week. Just like everyone else, I believed in him when he announced with certainty that he would turn around the unemployment rate. I witnessed his disappointment as the months went by and he did not pull it off.

  At least at the beginning of his term, François kept his campaign promises. Our only disagreement at the time was the closure of the Florange factory – we had heated arguments about that, each of us fiercely defending our own opinion.

  I had not forgotten that intense moment during the campaign when he hauled himself onto the roof of the workers’ van and promised he would save their company. I was in favour of the Ministry for Industrial Renewal’s proposal to nationalise.

  I am no economics expert, but I have eyes and ears. I sensed that voters would be baffled and disappointed by this 180-degree U-turn. When I tried to explain the strength of that symbol and told him that forswearing that promise would be synonymous with impotence and personal betrayal, he simply replied that there was no other option and that was that. There was hardly any point labouring my point any further.

  Everything happened so quickly. Today it is an open-and-shut case. The new Economic Adviser at the Élysée comes from a London-based British bank, one of the top City banks. The sound bite in François’ former rhetoric, ‘finance is my enemy’, is long forgotten. His old friend Michel Sapin, the Minister of the Economy, went as far as to say that ‘finance is our friend’. Such quiet cynicism! How can voters know what is what? Two years after being elected I sensed that François was lost, and that he had lost his way. ‘Change’ had certainly happened – but not the change we expected.

  I was turning the page and he sensed it. Would he need me as much as this if his popularity ratings had not dropped so drastically?

  He writes that he is losing everything and that the last thing that he wants to lose is me.

  Five days ago I reminded him of the ‘anniversary’ of his separation statement. A humiliation I had to withstand four months ago! When it happened, the shock of it numbed me. It was only afterwards that I realised just how traumatising it had been. Once I could see the bigger picture – I had not been aware of the international press coverage. One day, someone told me that they had found out that I had been dismissed from the Élysée on the cover of a Phnom Penh newspaper. Someone else said they had found I had been cheated on in a magazine from Bangkok – or Beijing, or Toronto, and so on and so forth.

  I had been thrown to the sharks in international waters without a second thought. I instinctively protected myself but the damage had been done.

  Every day in the street, women – for the most part, but there are men too – congratulate me on my ‘dignity’. Sometimes I am forced to soften their harsh words against the President. After the first round of the municipal elections, a man came up to me in the street and said: ‘I think about you every day. I have always voted for the Socialist Party, but this time I didn’t go because of what Hollande did to you.’

  My response to him was: ‘One can be angry or disappointed, but it’s important to vote regardless. I went. In fact, I even voted for the Socialist Party. Because I do not want the National Front to be France’s premier party.’

  My response seemed to have caught the man off-guard and he looked at me with wide eyes, then nodded his head: ‘OK, I’ll vote in the second round.’

  Another day, young schoolchildren – barely twelve, I’d guess – asked me if I would pose for a picture with them. I said yes, as I always do. One of them said: ‘I will never vote for Hollande after what he did to you!’ I simply smiled because by the time he comes of voting age, 2017 will have passed already… For these young children, the first vote in presidential election will be in 2022.

  Many people share with me their break-up stories and how they were cheated on. They tell me they think I am very strong; sometimes they go as far as describing the ch
ange they see in me as a ‘metamorphosis’. They say I am less tense, more natural now. I have been freed of the chains of protocol, as I have been freed of the chains of that passion. Day after day, I emerge from the prison without chains or bars of being madly in love.

  But the strength people see in me is just a front. I have been medicated for four months. As a prominent psychiatrist put it, ‘I have rarely witnessed such a violent shock.’ In spite of the treatment, I still occasionally break down over the smallest of things – sometimes all it takes is a minor detail and the brutality of what I went through re-emerges. A fortnight ago, I went to the wedding of a couple of friends. A young lady came to see me and said she was from Tulle: ‘You know, in Corrèze, we liked you a lot,’ she said. I was unable to control the tears and started sobbing. Hearing about Tulle reminded me of happier times. I was moved to hear that in Corrèze, people appreciated me as I was – they saw beyond the ambitious and manipulative woman I had been painted as.

  As days go by, my anger against François grows: how could he have made such a mess of everything? Our relationship and the start of his five-year term. That question keeps going around and around in my head. No doubt in his too. He has written to me to explain himself: ‘I was lost and I lost myself.’ Not a day goes by without him begging for my forgiveness and asking me to start over. I cannot do it, even if I wanted to. The pain I went through was too strong. As strong as the love I bore him.

  Until our separation I was in love with him, wildly so, I would have done anything for him to look at me, to compliment me, to be thoughtful and attentive to me. I was ‘crazy in love’, as they say. As time went by I was just crazy. His unfaithfulness broke the spell. I loved him too much.

  I cannot explain why I failed to see immediately what trap I was falling into. The kiss in Limoges was the starting point of a downward spiral. I cannot understand what prevented me from seeing just how much pain was about to rain down on me. For years, I was out of my depth, blinded and overwhelmed by a love I had long denied. When we said goodbye, early in the morning after our first night together, in Limoges, he came with me to the train station. He did not hide. The night before he had declared his love to me. He did not just want to seduce me, he wanted me to love him. His demands on me kept increasing, and when I in turn said ‘I love you’, he needed me to love him and no one else, and, eventually, he wanted me to love him more than I had ever loved anyone else before.

  Which I did. He had won me over completely. I was under his thumb, he had power over me. He had always managed to get me back, even when I had tried to distance myself, hurt either by something unspoken or by a lie.

  Every day he would say that we had lost fifteen years. ‘We haven’t,’ I would reply, ‘it was fate.’ If our relationship had started fifteen years earlier we might already have separated. As it happens, we did not even last fifteen years…

  We had each built a life before and I am proud that my sons look like their father, that they inherited his innate class.

  After Limoges, we met in a restaurant we had nicknamed ‘the table at the back’. We would have lunch there, hidden away from prying eyes, often until four o’clock. We could never say goodbye. We stayed on the phone for hours. We had so much to say to one another, so much we wanted to share, it was like water finally bursting forth from a dam.

  The first summer holidays since our affair had started were fast approaching. I told my husband I had met someone. I did not tell him who it was but he soon found out. Today I understand how distraught he was. Now I know just how far suffering can go, I understand what madness it can elicit.

  Just before the summer, François and I were able to steal a few moments of intense happiness. When the time came to go on holiday with our respective families we were beyond miserable. Separating for a month was more than we could bear. I missed everything about him when he was not there. I was under his spell. We spoke of running away together. We eventually gave up on the idea for our children’s sake.

  He said he was going through hell. But that summer, I saw pictures of him in magazines, looking happy with his family. Was he deceiving me? I never questioned his love. No man had ever shown his love for me as he did.

  In September 2005 Ségolène Royal found out about us. She immediately announced that she planned on running in the Socialist Party primaries in an interview with … Paris-Match. It was a direct message but François did not take her statement seriously.

  The scenario for the latest film noir was being written … The witch-hunt was open and I was the witch. Paris-Match had been tipped off by Ségolène Royal and the magazine’s board put pressure on me. Moreover, her team threatened me with retribution. Ségolène Royal’s supporters also threatened to retaliate. I was worried, but François reassured me, he was certain that things would calm down and that she would not see her primaries candidacy through.

  In December, François suggested we move in together. I said no – I was not ready. I feared it would be splashed all over the media. I even had nightmares about it – imagining that I was being exposed naked on a square, that I had nowhere to hide.

  The threats were cranked up a notch, and even the Paris-Match board was pressured to let me go. François and I tried several times to separate – we each went back to our homes, back to our daily lives. I did not want to be responsible for what would most likely happen: even though he was the First Secretary of the Socialist Party and, accordingly, his party’s legitimate candidate, he would not be able to stand in the Socialist Party primaries. Ségolène Royal was defying him in public in hopes that, in private, he would give in. And it was over me that they were duelling…

  François did not give in. As it became increasingly apparent that the mother of his children would really stand and that her candidacy was starting to be taken seriously, he continued to tell me that he needed me more than ever. It wasn’t because he was stuck. He told me Ségolène Royal had clearly laid out the terms of the bargain: ‘If you leave that woman, I will let you stand in the presidential election.’

  François had to choose between his political future and me. Once again we tried and failed to separate. Another summer was coming around. We were preparing to go on separate holidays. I was going away alone with my children and François was preparing to play happy families. The perfect family, in fact: the First Secretary of the Socialist Party who was taking a step back for the mother of his children.

  Journalists were going mad for this romantic tale, never imagining for a second that it was turning into a nightmare. The media monster had been created and needed feeding.

  Meanwhile, Ségolène Royal’s anger and suffering over the problems in her relationship – which she kept quiet about – fuelled her ambition and energy. She had become unstoppable. There were more and more polls in her favour. She was leading in the race. François asked all his friends to support her and denied it to my face. He knew he was out of the game; she had won. All things considered, he preferred Ségolène Royal to win over Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Laurent Fabius or Lionel Jospin – who had attempted a political comeback in the summer of 2006.

  I very nearly went to see the former Prime Minister to tell him the truth of the matter. I considered explaining that François was tied down by a personal dilemma and could therefore not publicly announce his ambition to run in the Socialist primaries. In the end I decided against it: I was a journalist, it was not my place, and I would have felt like I was betraying François.

  Ségolène Royal was appointed with flying colours. I was stunned. I wanted to put an end to my relationship with François as I had no wish to participate in the media lie of a united couple backing one another in the Élysée race – the French version of Bill and Hillary Clinton. I did not want to be an accomplice to this farce. I felt like I was in a bad film that could only end in disaster.

  The who’s who of politics and media in Paris had heard about our affair. Paris-Match editorial meetings had become hell. When the subject of the Hollande–
Royal couple came up, all eyes were on me. I did not look away, but I paid the price for it.

  The last straw was another lie from François, one too many. My mind was made up, this time I really was going to leave him. I did, and stayed silent for three weeks – I was gritting my teeth. A friend in common told me that François had never been so unhappy but was determined to stay strong for once … until one Sunday morning he stopped me on my way to the market. He had been waiting for me for hours.

  He got me back – yet again. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. His strength of persuasion was nuclear.

  Despite his love for me, he campaigned for Ségolène Royal after she won in the primaries. For her, he went on the electoral trail all over France with barely any media coverage – conversely, ‘the candidate’, as he called her, was idolised in meetings. He gave her campaign his all, I can bear witness to that. He put so much energy and time into campaigning for her that we saw each other very infrequently. He wanted his side to win but, from January 2007, he was increasingly doubtful about Ségolène Royal’s chances.

  Royal’s credibility was dropping, polls reflected voters’ doubts. François must have told me a million times that she wasn’t up to the task. There is a world of difference between a traditional political career and running for the Élysée. You need to be on top of economic and geopolitical subjects – a mass of knowledge and relations you cannot acquire in just a few weeks.

  People started to talk about the in-fighting – the party and the campaign team had strong differences of opinion, mirroring the disagreements between Ségolène Royal and François Hollande. The two of them had practically no direct contact. She had set up camp in her campaign HQ. Often it was through AFP news items that François found out about new promises Ségolène Royal had made, and he always saw the latest party posters after everyone else.