JOURNALIST Pauline Delassus has penned a memoir of actress Julie Gayet titled Mademoiselle. Gayet hit the headlines when her affair with the French president was revealed in Closer magazine in its Jan 2014 issue.
JOURNALIST Pauline Delassus has penned a memoir of actress Julie Gayet titled Mademoiselle. Gayet hit the headlines when her affair with the French president was revealed in Closer magazine in its Jan 2014 issue.

THE most sensational event of the week in France was the coming out on Wednesday of a book carrying a somewhat flat-sounding title Mademoiselle.

You’re likely to react: “So what’s so exciting about that?” Well, for one, it is the biography of the actress Julie Gayet who has been referred to by the media for the past two years as the “First Lady of the Shadows” since after the publication of the photographs of President François Hollande secretly entering and leaving her house on a scooter.

The pop magazine which had made the revelation is called Closer and when the photographs were published in its Jan 2014 issue, Hollande was still living with his then girlfriend Valerie Trierweiler. Only a few days following the Closer scoop, she angrily slammed behind her the Elysée Palace door and wrote her own book. But that’s another story.

To come back to Gayet, she was hardly known by the general public, being a bit player in movies and a number of television series and a film producer of sorts. Now that she has become a celebrity in her own way, a journalist named Pauline Delassus who also works for Paris Match in her spare hours, decided to write an entire book. She says it is the result of eleven months of hard work and has the full backing of Gayet.

According to the book, Gayet is madly in love with Hollande and claims he is soon going to marry her despite their age difference, she being in her early forties and the president some twenty years her elder.

Reactions are already sceptical. Most French people believe Hollande has never been the man to get involved in a till-death-do-us-part sort of commitment, as his past shows. From 1978 onwards he lived for thirty years with the current Ecology Minister Segolene Royal, having four children with her but never wanting to tie the knot. When he was elected president in 2012 he brought with him to the Elysée Palace Tierweiler who was quickly named “First Girlfriend” by the pop media.

According to the book, Gayet is more than a movie actress. She is an intellectual and a fighter for leftist causes with a powerful ideological influence over the president. The writer also claims that a number of current socialist ministers were appointed on the recommendations of the “First Lady of the Shadows”. One of these is the Moroccan-born Labour Minister Myriam El Khomri. The author of the book puts forth a number of questions in the context of next year’s presidential election: “Is Gayet the ultimate political weapon of Hollande who is extremely unpopular, given the latest opinion polls?

“Gayet has certainly not gone through the same upheavals as the president nor does she know his political victories or defeats. But she certainly has knowledge of the exercise of power, its solitude and its fatigues. She was close to Hollande during the toughest challenges he faced but remained in the shadows and backed him during his most difficult hours. She finally gained influence over him without ever being brutal. She has won his heart but now she must win the hearts of the people. A second presidential term for Hollande will also be her victory and Mademoiselle will then really be in power.”

Delassus continues: “Never in the history of France has a presidential candidate been a lonely man. Though Hollande was not married, he nevertheless had Tierweiler by his side in the 2012 election. Women have played a traditional role by defending humanitarian and cultural causes and have contributed to the popularity, or otherwise, of their husbands. Is 2017 really the year when Gayet will finally come out of her shadows?”

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, May 15th, 2016

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