The turmoil within France’s First Family deepened yesterday as it emerged that President François Hollande was introduced to his current mistress by his son, reports The Times.
Thomas Hollande, 29, the oldest of his four children, organised the lunch in 2012 that brought Julie Gayet, 41, a film actress, and the French leader together. Ms Trierweiler has always faced hostility from his partner’s four children for breaking up his relationship with their mother, Ségolène Royal.
France’s First Lady was rushed to hospital last week after Mr Hollande admitted that he was having an affair with Ms Gayet. Friends of Valérie Trierweiler told journalists that she had taken an overdose of pills when she learnt that the affair— which Mr Hollande had always denied — was about to be revealed in Closer, the glossy magazine.
Le Point, a news magazine, said: “That night when she went back home, she swallowed some pills. The next morning she woke up feeling sick.”
Friends denied that her actions amount to a suicide attempt. “She just took a pill too many,” one friend told the weekly. Another magazine published pictures yesterday night purporting to show Ms Royal, Mr Hollande’s previous partner, visiting Ms Trierweiler in hospital. Ms Royal described the report as “completely false”.
The French Establishment is braced for more scandal today when Closer is promising further revelations about Mr Hollande’s love life. Ms Trierweiler is being treated, officially for stress and exhaustion, in Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where Diana, Princess of Wales, died after a car crash in Paris in 1997.
Ms Gayet is suing Closer magazine for breach of privacy and demanding 50,000 euros in damages. This morning Closer reports that Mr Hollande and Ms Gayet have been lovers since 2012 and have been spending romantic weekends together in the south of France without Ms Trierweiler’s knowledge. The magazine says the couple have been using two flats near the Élysée Palace for secret assignations.
Doctors have banned President Hollande from visiting Ms Trierweiler in hospital for fear that his presence might traumatise her, it emerged this evening.
Mr Hollande has yet to pay a visit and with critics accusing him of callous behaviour, Ms Trierweiler’s friends let it be known last night that he was acting on doctors’ orders and said that he had sent her chocolates and flowers.
They said that it was customary for doctors to ban their patients from seeing their partners in such cases. RTL, the French radio station, said that Ms Trierweiler was still too weak to stand up, and was suffering extremely low blood pressure.
Details of her hospital regime came amid reports that Ségolène Royal, the mother of Mr Hollande’s four children, had herself visited Ms Trierweiler in hospital. The claims were surprising, since the two women had been at war since Mr Hollande left Ms Royal for Ms Trierweiler.
Voici, the glossy magazine, published a photograph it said showed her entering the hospital and said that she had spent a couple of hours with Ms Trierweiler. Ms Royal flatly denied it, saying that the report was“completely false”. A source close to her denounced it as “grotesque”.
Ms Trierweiler is believed to have been seeking a truce with Ms Royal after years of quarrels. She is said to have hoped that if she could smooth over the dispute it would improve her relations with the Hollande family.
Her status as an outsider in the clan was underlined by reports that Thomas Hollande, the President’s eldest son, was the one who had introduced him to Ms Gayet. There is no suggestion that he envisaged or planned an affair between his father and the actress.
Mr Hollande met Ms Royal in 1978 when both were students at the prestigious École Nationale d’Administration, the civil service college that trains the French elite. They had four children - Thomas, 29, an employment lawyer, Clémence, 27, a junior doctor, Julien, 26, a film-maker, and Flora, 21, a psychology student. All were born out of wedlock, like 56 per cent of French babies.
Both Mr Hollande and Ms Royal had risen to positions of prominence within the Socialist Party by the late 1990s - he as the party’s general-secretary, she as minister for higher education - and both saw themselves as a future president of France. When the Socialists began looking for a challenger to take on Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential election, Ms Royal was quickest to announce her candidancy.
It emerged later that Mr Hollande had other things on his mind - notably the red-headed political correspondent for Paris Match with whom he had begun an affair in 2004.
Ms Royal struggled throughout the election campaign to hang on to her partner, promising to forgive his cheating if he would get rid of his mistress. Friends say that she was also ready to pardon him for his lacklustre performance as Socialist Party leader, which contributed in no small measure to her defeat at Mr Sarkozy’s hands.
Yet after three years of hesitation, Mr Hollande finally opted for Ms Trierweiler, and they set up home in a flat in Paris’s 15th district.
Ms Royal announced publicly her separation from Mr Hollande hours after losing the presidential poll. Ms Trierweiler, who has three sons of her own from her marriage to Denis Trierweiler, also a Paris Match journalist, was greeted by Mr Hollande’s children with the sort of diffidence that is customary in such situations.
Friends say that relations had grown cordial by 2011, when Mr Hollande defeated Ms Royal in the Socialist primary. He beat Mr Sarkozy in the presidential election a year later. Ms Trierweiler destroyed the peace with a Twitter message that became headline news. In it, she expressed support for Olivier Falorni, a dissident Socialist running against Ms Royal in parliamentary elections.
Ms Royal’s children were appalled and refused to see or speak to Ms Trierweiler for more than a year. This meant that they were unable to go on holiday with their father, or even to drop in to see him unless his partner was away.
Before the rift, Thomas Hollande had introduced his father to his new girlfriend, Joyce Jonathan, a pop star whose friends included Ms Gayet, a left-wing activist keen to promote arthouse movies through her production companies.
Read more of this report from The Times.