The story of the French president’s mistresses is “fit to
print” in the New York Times.
As expected, the Times approach is more serious and more sober
than what you read in the tabloids. In some ways, that makes it a more damning
indictment.
Elaine Sciolino and her co-authors begin by observing that, après tout, and for all his sins,
President Francois Hollande is not even a man of his word:
As
a candidate for the French presidency in 2012, François Hollande promised to be
more boring spouse than flamboyant seducer.
Determined
to set himself apart from the man he was seeking to unseat — Nicolas Sarkozy,
whose marriage to the former supermodel Carla Bruni had helped make him tabloid
fodder — Mr. Hollande proclaimed, “I, president of the republic, will make sure
that my behavior is exemplary at every moment.”
Twenty
months into his presidency, Mr. Hollande’s campaign pledge is faring even less
well than the unemployment-cursed French economy.
Yes, indeed, but at least Nicolas Sarkozy had enough respect
to marry Carla Bruni. Only the French know what Hollande meant when he promised
that his behavior would be exemplary.
As though that were not bad enough, the Hollande drama feels
more like a “bedroom farce” than Shakespeare. In France, the question would be:
does it rise to the level of Moliere?
Sciolino et al. write:
Caught
in a clandestine affair that is more bedroom farce than Shakespearean drama — a
beautiful actress, a scorned woman at home, surreptitious comings and goings on
a most unpresidential scooter — Mr. Hollande is testing the limits of France’s
tolerance for private indiscretion and leaving himself vulnerable to ridicule.
This has distracted from the more important affairs of state:
Mr.
Hollande’s personal drama was playing out over the past two weeks as he was
making one of the most substantive decisions of his term so far, proposing to cut corporate taxes and reduce public
spending, moves that unnerved the left wing of his Socialist Party but also
drew plaudits from the business world.
Hollande’s supporters are assuming, as Mme Trierweiler is,
that she and Francois can get through it just like the Clintons did.
Apparently, Hollande has another idea. Rumors have it that he is going to dump
Trierweiler for his younger mistress.
To his
supporters, this is the start of a new chapter for Mr. Hollande in which he is
emerging as a more mature and pragmatic leader who may be freed from what had
become a complicated relationship with Ms. Trierweiler.
They
are banking on the assumption that what would be a media circus to an American
president will be treated as a sideshow by the French, and that the story will
die down.
For now it is not dying down.
The Times offers the best explanation for Hollande’s
actions:
Mr.
Hollande long seems to have assumed that he could live by his own rules.
Some have suggested, despite my urgings to the contrary,
that this has nothing to do with age. For the second time in his life Hollande
has abandoned a fiftyish woman for a fortyish woman. To be clearer, he abandoned
menopausal women for women who are not menopausal.
Even in the Times, I find no real awareness of the fact that
Valerie Trierweiler attempted suicide by taking an overdose of pills. Perhaps
it’s an abundance of discretion. Perhaps the Times is covering up the truth:
Members
of the French public at first took the revelations in their usual sexually
sophisticated stride, but not Ms. Trierweiler. People who know her well said
she was so devastated by the news that she checked herself into a hospital.
Obviously, people who know her well would say that she just
checked herself into a hospital. In fact, she checked into a psychiatric
hospital where her psychiatrists refused to allow President Hollande to see her
for six days.
Do the math.
As the story drags on, the sophisticated French are becoming
alarmed. Sciolino et al. report:
“This
makes the French look like idiots,” said Arlette da Rocha, who runs the
restaurant Le Pressoir in Tulle, where Mr. Hollande started his political
career. “He has to tell the truth. This unconventional behavior in his private
life doesn’t give a clean image of the president.”
Of course, the story is made all the more salient by the
fact that Hollande never bothered to marry Trierweiler.
His comments on the subject, duly reported by the Times, are
damning:
Mr.
Hollande never married Ms. Trierweiler, even though he described her in an
interview with Gala magazine in October 2010 as “the woman of my life.” By the
following February, he had curbed his enthusiasm. “The sentence was maladroit,”
he said. “I should have said, ‘She is the woman of my life today.’ ”
Credit the French with savoir faire. Credit Hollande with
knowing how to appeal to women voters.
The sophisticated Frenchman knows what women really, really
want: to be the women of a man’s life… today.
4 comments:
What a creep! Why does he care about menopause? Altho Ghandi slept chastely naked w/young girls, and let his wife die needlessly.
Why do the French keep electing boulevardiers?
Altho we must admit, Clinton was a rapist or darn close. "Put some ice on that cut lip". Much worse.
Are the French mistresses guiltless? They were all Climbers. "Trust not in the gratitude of Princes".
It's not sex, it's just sad. -- Rich
Another example of sound ethics: "Because I can."
Tip
Ah, those free-thinking Socialists.
I looked for articles about Hollande and Trierweiller on the lemonde.fr site and all I came up with were two videos....one of Bernadette Chirac, who said she had sent "un tout petit mot a Madame T....parce qu'elle me semblait triste"... (how very perspicacious of her!)and another where Hollande made alaconic public statement in Holland (no pun intended) that "Mme. T va mieux." It's clear that neither thinks it should be a big deal.
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