Thank You for This Moment

by Valérie Trierweiler

  As a result of his refusal to address his dissatisfaction with me head-on, his behaviour became boorish. 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.’ I thought he was joking, but he was not. He stared at me, cold and unsmiling. In his mind, I was there to make him look good but I was no good to him. And there I was, dressed up to the nines – I had tried to look pretty for him, so he would be proud of me. On another occasion, he barked: ‘Go get changed! Get dressed!’ because he thought my dress was too sexy. He wanted to bring me to heel and I had to stand up for myself: I agreed to wear a wrap over my bare shoulders, but that was where I drew the line.

  Slowly but surely, his cutting remarks made me lose every last scrap of self-confidence. One day I mentioned that I had bumped into Cécilia Sarkozy at the Unitaid dinner, and that in front of Bill Clinton she had said: ‘Without you, Hollande would never have been elected.’ I know how instrumental she was in Nicolas Sarkozy’s career and I admired her courage when she walked out. François 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.’

  I felt very lost having to justify my existence in his life. Did our love still mean anything to him?

  2014…

  I went to bed very late last night. I cannot get out of bed now. Nor can I go back to sleep. This has happened a lot since our separation. I switch the radio on and it half sends me to sleep. Suddenly, a radio show on France Inter catches my attention. It is called Service Public19 on upwards social mobility – the theme being ‘It is not written’.

  A memoirist talks about his childhood in social services, and then going home to live with his alcoholic mother and stepfather. He is now CEO of an SME. A researcher on the show said something which really hit home for me: ‘When you climb the social ladder, you have to remember to stay true to yourself, and you often hurt for other people.’

  Why is it only when other people explain self-evident things that I finally understand them? I have ‘gone up in the world’ since my days in the banlieue in Angers, but I am not myself anymore and I am a ball of hurt, everything hurts, and I hurt for other people. That old feeling of not being legitimate haunts me throughout the duration of the radio show. Is vertical mobility the reason why I always felt illegitimate – both in my relationship and at the Élysée Palace? Why was I so in love with a man whom I had nothing in common with?

  I remember a Christmas dinner one evening at my mother’s in Angers, with my brothers and sisters, their spouses, and my nephews and nieces – all twenty-five of us.

  After dinner, François turned to me and said with a snicker: ‘Well, the Massonneaus certainly ain’t a pretty bunch…’

  It was like a slap in the face and still stings, months later. How could François have said that about my family? So the Massonneau family is ‘not a pretty bunch’, is it? Well, it certainly is typical of the people who voted for him.

  Though it is very revealing of who François is, I was reluctant to tell that anecdote because it is hurtful for my family, who were so happy to get to know him and so proud to have him for dinner.

  But I want to wash away so many lies, emerge from this book without the burden of so many unspoken things. I want to apologise to you, my family, for having fallen in love with a man who could snigger about the Massonneaus not being ‘a pretty bunch’. I am proud of you. Not one of my brothers and sisters has gone astray. Some have made it, some less so, but we all know how to reach out and express our love for each other. The words ‘family’ and ‘solidarity’ really mean something – for François they are purely abstract. Not once has he invited his father or his brother to the Élysée Palace. He wants to single himself out – a President who is proudly alone.

  Which side of the tracks do you have to be born on to look like ‘a pretty bunch’? Granted, in my family, no one has been to a ‘Grandes école’ – not for us, the École nationale d’administration or the equally prestigious école des Hautes Études Commerciales, known as HEC. None of us owns a clinic, none of us have done business in real estate like his father. None of us owns a property in Mougins on the French Riviera – unlike François. None of us are senior civil servants, none of us are famous – like the people he has been socialising with since the ‘Voltaire year’ of the École Nationale d’administration. The Massonneaus are a French working-class family. Working class but proud of who we are.

  His sentence was so full of bile and spite, it haunts me and now that the spell is broken, I am freed from the magic of the way he looked at me. He made himself out to be the man who doesn’t like rich people but in truth the President doesn’t like the poor. This Socialist privately calls them ‘the toothless’, proud of his quip.

  I thought back with bitterness to my family who ‘ain’t a pretty bunch’ when I found out that during his affair with Julie Gayet, François had been to her parents’ lavish château – seventeenth-century walls surrounded by a magnificent park. It is certainly more stylish than a council flat in a small-town banlieue! Much nicer than a mobile home in the middle of a starless campsite not too far from the sea.

  Now there’s a family just as François likes them: a surgeon for a grandfather, an antique dealer for a grandmother, a renowned doctor and adviser to ministers for a father. A tidy little world, a ‘pretty’ little world, a ‘boho’ little world, with its fine and refined taste, where the guests are famous, where everyone votes Socialist but no one knows how much minimum wage is. Back home we don’t need notes drafted by ministerial advisers to know that. You just have to look at the bottom of your payslip.

  People have called me a bourgeoise, cold and cruel – I was simply not in my own world. Illegitimate, and doubly so. After the separation statement, my family stood behind me. You don’t get forsaken in the Massonneau family. They all stood and supported me. That man who played nice guy, telling jokes at the dinner table, was bored with that ‘not-a-pretty-sight’ family and favoured dinners in town. A shame: he could have learned a lot from the Massonneau family about the way the French feel: we don’t beat around the bush, we don’t lie, we call a spade a spade, we tell it like it is and we look people in the eyes when we do.

  KING OF EQUIVOCAL remarks, François also said to me one day: ‘What I love about you is that you never forget where you are from.’

  How could I? Rumour has it that I have inherited colossal wealth from my banker grandfather who died before my birth – as if France had never seen a single family climb down the social ladder.

  Would my mother have worked as a cashier if we had had that kind of money? A five-year-old would figure out that it makes no sense, but the rumour obstinately sticks and is still on Wikipedia. No, I do not own a château or a sprawling mansion, unlike other First Ladies before me, such as Carla Bruni-Sarzoky, Bernadette Chirac and Anne-Aymone Giscard d’Estaing. But our council house looked like a palace to me the first time I stepped over the threshold. I had just turned four, we were moving from a tower block full of council flats, and suddenly we were in a house with a garden. So even though we were four to a room, yes, it was a palace.

  I really did have all the faults for the role: not married, not wealthy, working class and working … It really wasn’t very First Lady-like of me at all. Critics will say what they will but I smashed my glass ceiling the day I set foot on the red carpet. I smashed through it so hard that thousands of shards of glass cut me deeply on the way.

  I put my heart and soul into my new role from the very first day I arrived at the Élysée Palace. I immediately met with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s former team and asked her team leader and each of her assistants what they had in mind going forward. Though my drama queen reputation had preceded
me, they all decided to stay on board. All of them. I do not think they came to regret it, far from it. We lived through some intense moments together. With their precious help, I got stuck in straight away prepping the President’s trip to the US. I was asked to choose a gift for Michelle Obama. I chose products that had been made in Corrèze, a handbag and beauty products – a nod to the Corrèze region – at a fraction of the usual cost of official gifts.

  A few days after the election, I flew off to Washington alongside the President. When I climbed onto the private presidential plane I understood why the press had nicknamed it ‘Air Sarkozy’: inside the plane, there is a large room, a bathroom, an office for the President and a room for meetings and lunches. Eleven seats around the table. Most of the time the seats are filled by ministers, the Chief of Staff and the Diplomatic Adviser – both worthy men. Laurent Fabius aside, you hardly needed to be an expert to see that the new Cabinet ministers did not have what it took. What I heard was disheartening to say the least. I observed them in silence, wondering how any of them could have been appointed ministers. Their appointment was all about balancing factions, gender, regions and parties. Few of them were there because of a particular aptitude for the role. That much was abundantly obvious to the former political journalist I still was deep down. The press was very critical of their amateurism and I might well have written the same thing had I still been working for Paris-Match’s political pages. But I kept my mouth shut.

  In Washington, I had the strange feeling that I was an actress in a film that I was also a spectator of. The ambassador’s wife took me under her wing and organised meetings with the US press. The media was curious about me: I was ‘the French woman who is still working’ and ‘the unmarried First Lady’. Still, in their eyes I was also a colleague and it went off smoothly.

  I was not included in the Presidents’ programme because it was not a state visit: François Hollande was in the US for a NATO council. I realised that I would leave the US without getting a chance to meet Barack Obama, a privilege that would have made me very proud. I was in the First Ladies’ programme. I keenly appreciated how much of an honour it was to be welcomed by Michelle Obama at the White House. She waited for us in the hall and greeted each of us individually – there were eight First Ladies in total. She embraced us as if we were friends – US-style.

  Michelle Obama is the person who most impressed me over the last couple of years.

  Physically, to begin with. Even though I was wearing very high heels I only reached her shoulders. As for elegance and poise, I didn’t even come close. She was tall, beautiful and much slimmer than in pictures. She stretched her long arms with a swan’s grace.

  She radiated charisma, she had a real aura about her.

  Michelle Obama was the perfect hostess and showed us around the White House before lunch. I had to pinch myself to realise where I was. I kept reminding myself to enjoy every second of these unique moments that fate was bestowing upon me.

  The US First Lady had done her research about each of us. She and I had a brief exchange about my work with the Danielle Mitterrand Foundation. In shaky English, I asked her about her programme to combat obesity. Meanwhile, she confessed that it had taken her a year to find her feet in this First Lady role that is not quite like any other. Everyone had already forgotten that when she first became First Lady, she made sensational statements about her husband’s dirty socks, something which did not go down well with Americans – who took a while to adjust to the first black couple in the White House.

  Ever mindful of etiquette, Michelle Obama granted the same discussion time to each First Lady. Conversation was fairly mundane. I observed her and wondered about her – a woman who from the outside was so perfect and impenetrable. Was she enjoying this encounter or was she merely playing a role that had already been written, in which going off-script was simply not an option? I thought of how she had given up a high-flying career as a lawyer to serve her husband’s career. She could have earned millions of dollars and worked on high-profile cases. But there she was, waxing lyrical about her kitchen garden, which she would show us around later. The vegetables on our plates came from her garden, the cooks had done wonders with them but the portions were so small that I was still a little hungry after lunch. I had a hunger for a lot of things, in fact. How I would have loved to have a proper conversation with her! I would have given a lot to find out who was under that perfect mask of hers, to find out what she really thought of being First Lady – a role that has far more rules and constraints in the US than in France, but which is also a position with real status.

  The next morning I found out on the internet that I was now being nicknamed the ‘First Girlfriend’. After a US broadsheet had used the expression, the French press had taken it on and was having a field day with it. It made me uncomfortable, I felt like I had outgrown being a ‘girlfriend’, especially after seven years of living with François, but such is the media game.

  Mid-morning, I joined Michelle Obama in Chicago. She took us to the suburb she had grown up in. She wanted to show us an organisation that took care of under-privileged children and gave them access to all sorts of activities their parents would never be able to afford for them.

  After the visit, Michelle Obama gave a speech to the other First Ladies and an audience of young people. It showed true political commitment and she bowled me over: ‘You might not all become Presidents, but you can become doctors, lawyers … Barack and I became what we are by working hard. Give yourselves the means to become what you want to become!’ Michelle Obama was inspiring. In later official trips, when I visited orphanages in South Africa or in India’s poorest quarters I repeated her words, trying to recapture the strength she instilled in them. The idea that you should not give up simply because you were not born in the right place was a message that really struck a chord with me. Luck is something you deserve. And once you’ve earned it, you should share it.

  In the evening, we had dinner with a dozen women, including two of Michelle Obama’s best friends, in a Chicago museum. The setting was magical. Michelle Obama had pulled out all the stops.

  François had flown off to Camp David early the previous evening – the First Ladies were not joining their spouses on that leg of the trip. After dinner, I was left to my own devices – in our hotel suite guarded by an impressive number of US security officers.

  Back in Washington, a French journalist living in the US whom I had known for years invited me to dinner. She said she wanted to write a book about First Ladies. I made it clear that I was agreeing to dinner only, not to her book. We talked about our lives, I told her about my children and shared a few of my worries and concerns. At the end of the dinner, she confessed that she was working on a book about me… I was alarmed: ‘We had an agreement: this dinner was off the record, right?’ She promised me it was. Besides, she had not taken any notes or recorded our conversation. I wasn’t worried.

  Two months later I found out she had betrayed me. Not only had she used the information I had shared with her in complete confidence, but she had also distorted it entirely. I took her to court over her book, La Frondeuse.20 At the hearing, the author implied that I had shared intimate details of previous romantic involvements. A barefaced lie.

  That series of books about me revealing my alleged neurotic personality, by journalists I had not even met for the most part, was one of the worst ordeals I have ever had to go through. In the first few months of the presidential mandate they were a dime a dozen. The first one to come out was penned by a former deputy director at Le Monde and set the ‘standard’ for the rest. The title of the book alone, La favorite,21 was insulting. He had never met me. I did not even know his name. He made liberal use of ‘poetic’ licence, fabricated, attacked and misrepresented me. A despicable exercise in ‘style’. It is very strange to experience the reinvention and fictionalisation of your life. I stood by, powerless, as a character was born who had my name, my face, my life, but who was not me – it was all
make-believe.

  I was alone. An aloneness that looked a lot like loneliness. Not a single woman spoke out in my defence – and feminists were noticeable in their absence. François’ response was pure indifference, as if the problem did not concern him. I was being saddled with a vile nickname and it did not bother him in the slightest.

  Meanwhile, a colleague at Paris-Match came up with another bon mot and made sure it circulated widely – I had become François Hollande’s ‘Rottweiler’, his watchdog. The catchphrase became the latest fad. Malicious gossip is a deplorable disease, though between friends it is often benign. But the consequences are tenfold when – as is possible nowadays – you can play that cruel little game with the entire world on social networks. The ‘network society’ breeds what US researchers call ‘cyber-bullying’ and a ‘culture of humiliation’.

  My skin was not thick enough back then to reject the venom – that came later. The onslaught was harsh and I felt besmirched. It was my Achilles’ heel. I tried to hide from my children just how much I was affected – not far from drowning – by all those books and all that sarcasm, because they too took it badly.

  Having learned from a young age to fight back against adversity distorted my vision of the world. By dint of seeing enemies everywhere, I ended up making a lot of them.