According to a joke doing the rounds on millennial timelines lately, if you haven’t found your soulmate, take heart ladies, he may not be born yet. 

The immediate reference is the new 
First Lady of France — Brigitte Trogneux, a 64-year-old grandmother of six who is married to President-elect Emmanuel Macron, 24 years her junior. 

The “unusual” love story of Macron and Trogneux caught the imagination of the French public in the run-up to the just-concluded national election, as well as of the world beyond, once it became evident that Macron, 39, would become France’s youngest head of state since Napoleon! 

The love story
It was 1993. He a 15-year-old student in Amiens, a city in northern France. She a 40-year-old married mum of three and the French and drama teacher in his school. She supervised a school play he was acting in. The next year, they rewrote a play together. They fell in love and the boy vowed to marry her one day. His parents packed him off to Paris to complete high school but he kept his word and in 2007, a year after Brigitte divorced her husband, they got married. Her children are nearly his age and her grandchildren reportedly call him “Daddy”. 

Two weapons
While little was made of Melania Trump’s 24-year age gap with an older Donald Trump, lengthy columns have been dedicated to dissecting Macron’s marriage and “older” wife. Their age gap is routinely satirised by the prolific cartoonists and tabloids of France but this couple have taken the scrutiny head-on. 

And it seems Brigitte has employed two very potent weapons to deal with the notoriously image-conscious French public and an obsessed world media — humour and fashion. 

According to a report in Mirror, UK, she has been quoted in a book on the new President telling a friend: “He needs to go for it (the Presidency) in 2017 because by 2022, his problem will be my face”. 

And if the British press are to be believed — she has herself never given a fashion interview — Brigitte has carefully cultivated a style that belies her 60-plus years, wearing her hair and clothes to convey youthful energy. And the Daily Mail has clearly said that they feel she’s had some nip and tuck done, some Botox and even a little facelift. 

Well, personal style or a physician’s efforts, it all seems to have paid off. As Macron made his victory speech outside the Louvre Museum after winning the election this week, he thanked his family and those close to him as the crowd cheered “Brigitte, Brigitte!”

Behind a successful man
It may be an old, over-used adage but it seems Brigitte has truly been a partner to Macron’s meteoric political rise, coaching him in long speeches and mentoring him through public life. And they made their marriage — 24-year age difference et al — an integral part of his presidential campaign. 

“She spends a lot of time here because her view matters to me, because she brings a different atmosphere, that is important. My life is here, you cannot work well if you are not happy,” Macron has been quoted saying about his wife’s involvement in his work. 

And her role is only going to get bigger. 

Macron has said she will have a formal, though unpaid, role as First Lady. “She will have an existence, she will have a voice there, a view on things. She will be at my side, as she has always been, but she will also have a public role,” he has clarified. 

Teacher, teacher
Every little boy has had a crush on a schoolteacher and dreamt of marrying her and living happily ever after. Only Emmanuel Macron had the gumption to follow it through. We’re not entirely sure about the “happily ever after” bit, though. According to a video on the President-elect’s daily life, marrying the teacher comes with its own set of disciplining... and no, we’re not “Greying” on you here!

According to The Times, London, in a documentary shot by a television unit that spent eight months with Macron to produce a 90-minute film titled Behind the Scenes of a Victory, the new French President “emerges as a boyish, but calm, boss of enthusiastic young staff, but he defers to Ms Trogneux.... Unwinding after the first TV debate in April, Mr Macron asks for a chocolate. Ms Trogneux stops him, saying: ‘I don’t want you to eat that rubbish.’ He meekly asks for water instead.” Gulp.

 

Samhita Chakraborty