Ex-drama teacher ends climax at Elysee Palace

Paris: When they first met, he was 15, she was a married 40-year old teacher coaching him in a school play. Set to enter the Elysee presidential palace as First Lady, Brigitte Macron will keep coaching her husband.

Newly-elected French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife, now 64, has been constantly by his side during his campaign, managing his agenda, editing his speeches and advising him on his stage presence.

For his victory speech after winning the first round of the election, Macron brought his wife onto the podium and thanked her. “Brigitte, always present, and even more now, without whom I would not be me,” an emotional Macron said as hundreds of his supporters shouted her name.

Both complete unknowns when Macron was appointed economy minister in Socialist President Francois Hollande’s government in August 2014, Brigitte Macron, born Trogneux, resigned from her teaching job a year later to help her ambitious young husband.

At the economy ministry, she was a discreet presence during meetings with officials in the modernist Bercy building by the Seine in eastern Paris. “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 said in his last staff meeting after he resigned from the Hollande government in August 2016.

He would not declare his presidential bid until three months later, on November 16, 2016, but by then he had already started making the relationship with Trogneux an integral part of his public persona. In the months leading up to his official candidacy, the French public discovered Trogneux in a series of cover stories in the popular society magazine Paris Match, including, in August 2016, one of the couple on the beach, the petite blonde looking svelte and tanned in a one-piece bathing suit. “Lovers’ holiday before the offensive”, read the headline.

Born Brigitte Trogneux April 13, 1953, the youngest of six children in a family of wealthy chocolate makers in the northern town of Amiens, she married a banker with whom she had three children. In 1993, in the Providence Jesuit college, where she taught French and drama, the young Macron acted in a play under her supervision. The next year, the two rewrote a play together, adapting it to include more roles. “Little by little, I came totally under the spell of the intelligence of this young boy,” Trogneux told France 3 TV.

As rumours started to fly about the relationship, Macron left Amiens to complete his last year of high school at the prestigious Lycee Henri IV in Paris. “You cannot get rid of me. I will come back and I will marry you,” he told her according to his biographers.