It takes a lot to raise eyebrows in the ongoing soap opera that is French politics – former President Nicholas Sarkozy, after all, married a supermodel while in office – but Presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s relationship has set tongues wagging.
Why? The 39-year-old former Rothschild investment banker’s wife is not only 24 years his senior, but also happens to be his high school French and drama teacher. Sacré bleu!
Brigitte Trogneux, 64, taught Macron the two subjects while he attended La Providence school in Amiens, north of Paris.
“He wasn’t like the others,” she said in a 2016 interview about Macron with a French documentary, the BBC reports. “He wasn’t a teenager. He had a relationship of equals with other adults.”
Macron moved to Paris to finish his schooling at 16, telling Trogneux, who was married with three children at the time, that he was determined to marry her. “We’d call each other all the time and spend hours on the phone,” she said. “Bit by bit, he defeated all my resistance, in an amazing way, with patience.”
The pair eventually married in 2007 after Trogneux left her husband.
If Macron, who represents his own party En Marche! (On the move) beats rival Marine Le Pen in the run-off election on May 7, the pair will well and truly be catapulted into the global spotlight.
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