president at his own power game by
refusing to let go of his hand for 29 seconds.
“He resisted the handshake of Trump,”
Martigny says. “He wanted to do the same
thing with Putin, to show he’s the strong
guy in the West against him.”
He goes on: “Macron will be re-elected
even though people don’t like him. He’s
young, bright, quick and clever — qualities
the French appreciate. He has tackled
huge crises and is still there, he’s survived.
Many people will respect that. They’ll be
saying, ‘Who else?’ ”
Even so, Macron remains something
of an enigma. Some commentators have
likened him to the 1970s television cartoon
character Barbapapa, a shape-shifting pink
blob who takes his name from the French
word for candyfloss. “He has absolutely
no ideological vertebrae,” Martigny adds.
“If he needs to go to the right, he’ll go to
the right, if he needs to go to the left, he’ll
go to the left. He thinks one thing and the
opposite very easily.”I
n the hope of learning more about the
polymath president I turn to Françoise
Noguès, 71, a former doctor who is one
of the guests at Dusapin’s sonorous
show. A male bodyguard shoots me
a suspicious glance as I approach the
mother of the president, a figure in a dark
coat clutching a black purse, but she offers
a friendly smile. She must be impressed
with the boy, I suggest, for scaling such
lofty heights. She nods, smiling, but then
explains how nerve-racking it has been to
see her son so reviled and threatened by
the yellow vests. She holds up a hand with
a laugh: “Look, I’ve lost my nails. I can’t
bear to put on the news any more.”
She is upset by a Macron biography that
claimed her son does not talk to her and was
mainly brought up by his grandmother. “It’s
just not true,” she tells me, adding that they
speak and message each other often.
As for her relationship with the première
dame, who fell in love with her son, 24 years
her junior, while teaching him drama at
school, she says: “Brigitte and I are good
friends.” Then adds with another laugh:
“We’re almost the same age.”
That is not the only curiosity about
life chez les Macron. Two of Macron’s
stepchildren, Laurence, a cardiologist,
and Sébastien, an engineer, are older than
him. His father, Jean-Michel, a professor
of neurology, has remarried after
separating from Noguès, and Macron
has a stepbrother aged 15.
There is nothing France appreciates more
than a love story — and Macron’s infatuation
with Brigitte Trogneux, as she was known
when he met her, aged 15, at the Jesuit
school he went to in Amiens, is like none
other. Brigitte was married at the time to
André-Louis Auzière, a banker, and already
a mother of three. The future president was
in the same class as Laurence Auzière, oneof Brigitte’s two daughters, and would spend
long hours round at her house near by.
“I thought he was in love with Laurence,”
says Noguès, who now lives in Paris.
The relationship between the adolescent
pupil and his after-school drama club
teacher became a scandalous topic in
Amiens. Noguès and her husband had
urged their son to stop seeing her until he
was 18. “He replied he would rather give
up his studies than be separated from her,”
Noguès recalls. “Brigitte also said she
thought parting would be impossible.”
The future president was sent off to
Paris to finish school at a prestigious lycée
and Brigitte visited him on weekends,
eventually divorcing her husband, who
died in 2019, aged 69.
At the wedding reception in Le Touquet
in 2007, Macron is reported to have told
Brigitte’s family in an after-dinner speech:
“Thank you for accepting us, for having
loved us as we are ... Particularly, I wanted
to thank the children of Brigitte. If there’s
anyone for whom this might not have been
simple, it’s them.”
People who have seen them together
are struck by how close they seem as a
couple — certainly in relation to previous
presidential duos: Mitterrand kept a
mistress and illegitimate daughter at the
expense of the state and Sarkozy divorced
and remarried in office. Hollande booted
his girlfriend out of the palace to install an
actress as première dame.
“Macron is probably the first faithful
president we’ve had since Pompidou,” says
Françoise Degois, author of The Man W ho
Had No Friends, a political essay covering
Macron’s five-year term. “Politics is not
his first love like the others. Brigitte is.”
After the show, Dusapin and Darel
invite me to dinner at Macron’s favourite
restaurant, La Rotonde, a famous art deco
brasserie in the Montparnasse district.
As we head south in the composer’s
second-hand Jaguar, the conversation“BRIGITTE
AND I ARE GOOD
FRIENDS,”
MACRON’S MOTHER
TELLS ME. “WE’RE
ALMOST THE SAME
AGE,” SHE ADDS
WITH A LAUGH
From top: the Macrons’ wedding,
2007; Brigitte, then Emmanuel’s
teacher, kisses him at a school play.
He was 15 when they started datingFRANCE 5 ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 15