By Odunewu Segun
The relationship between French Presidential hopefuls, Emmanuel Macron, and his elderly wife, Brigitte, confirms the saying that there is no obstacles to hard for love to conquer.
With 25 years differences in age, Brigittee is 64 while Macron is 39, the couple radiates love as both step out recently to thank their supporters for making it possible for Macron to win the first round of the French Presidential election.
The relationship between Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte might be a little outside customary French political tradition. They met the imposing private school founded by devout Jesuits in Amiens. He was 15, already steeped in the writings of French literary giants like André Gide – a teenage prodigy while Brigitte was his teacher, married to a local banker with three kids.
The teacher herself met him when the 15-year-old Macron played the lead role in a school play Jacques and his Master, by the deeply philosophical Czech émigré writer Milan Kundra.
Without any apparent bashfulness, he asked the mother-of-three if together they could re-write sections of the play The Art of Comedy by Eduardo De Filippo, to expand it to include 15 new roles.
To that end, they started seeing each other every Friday. There was no question, ever, of the pupil-teacher relationship exceeding any limits set down by French law, which defines the age of sexual consent as 18 in cases where one person has authority over the other.
In October 2007, 21 months after she divorced the banker André Louis Auzière, the 54-year-old Brigitte and the 29-year-old Macron married in the upmarket town of Le Tourquet, where they have a home.
Brigitte – who gave up teaching in 2015 to support her husband, then the French economy minister – has already been credited with bringing out a more extrovert side to the former Rothschild investment banker.
She has also had the foresight to warn those around her that they would “hear true and false remarks” about her husband. There have already been false rumours of a gay affair with Radio France chief executive Mathieu Gallet, wittily scotched by Macron, who revealed how close he remained to his wife.
