Ever since the gossip magazine Closer broke the story of French president François Hollande's secret love affair with actor Julie Gayet last January, all Paris had wondered what happened to their romance.
Everywhere she went – at the César awards in February, at the Cannes film festival in May and at the Deauville festival in September – photographers swarmed around Gayet. Were they? Weren’t they?
The president refused to comment at his September 18th press conference. One rumour had it that Gayet had heeded her upper middle class parents and had broken off the affair. Hollande had taken up with a junior minister, said another.
Now another gossip magazine, Voici, has published the first photographs of Hollande and Gayet together, seated at a table in the garden of the Élysée Palace last month. "Since the beginning of their affair, they had never been seen together!" exclaims the cover of the weekly magazine's November 21st edition.
On the day that Closer published photographs of Hollande riding on the back of a motor scooter to an assignation with Gayet, wearing a helmet as a disguise, Hollande's previous mistress, Valérie Trierweiler, was in hospital for an overdose of sleeping pills.
Two weeks later, the president issued a statement saying, “I have put an end to the life I shared with Valérie Trierweiler.”
Trierweiler got revenge on September 4th, when she published Thank You for This Moment; a Story of Love, Power and Betrayal. The book has sold 600,000 copies and is being translated into 11 languages, including Chinese and Vietnamese. By chance (or not?), publication of the photographs proving that Hollande and Gayet are still together coincides with a media blitz by Trierweiler in London to promote the British edition of her book.
The fact that a paparazzo could photograph the president and his mistress in the Élysée garden seems to indicate a serious lapse of security – or could Hollande have been an accomplice to the Voici story, just as François Mitterrand once allowed Paris Match to break the story of his secret daughter?
The scoop shows that the desperately unpopular president has held the affection of an attractive younger woman and distracts attention from Trierweiler’s UK book tour. It has also revived speculation that Hollande might marry, for the first time in his life.
Earlier this month, another gossip magazine, VSD, reported that Gayet spends almost every night at the Élysée and that she "is careful not to walk in front of the windows where she might be seen".
She is said to have spent several days at La Lanterne last summer. Trierweiler took refuge in the same presidential residence in Versailles after the Closer revelations.
According to Voici, a rich businessman lent the couple his mansion in the rue de Tournon last June, but their arrivals and departures attracted too much attention, so by September, Gayet began visiting Hollande at the Élysée, where they several times picnicked in the garden. Gayet allegedly nods when she passes servants and advisers in the halls of the palace and has changed the curtains in the presidential bedroom.
Hollande’s advisers are not looking forward to Trierweiler’s interviews with British media, but consider the damage has already been done by her portrayal of him as a mendacious and hard-hearted lover who scorns France’s poor.
“How quickly a fairy tale can unravel,” Trierweiler writes. “By the start of 2014, the entire edifice of my gilded life lay in ruins . . .
“I was lying in a hospital bed, weeping for the lost love of my life and knowing that nothing can ever be the same again.”
