generalspeaking

Monday, January 20, 2014

Scandalous? Non!

"Everyone knows French presidents have affairs, Chirac did little else. Mitterand famously responded to questions about his illegitimate daughter with the classically French phrase 'Et alors?' -- 'So what?' What exactly has Ms. Trierweiler achieved with this dramatic flouncing off to hospital? Instead of acting like generations of French women before her, she has drawn attention to herself and her role as the victim."
"It's just not chic. As Coco Chanel said: 'A girl should be two things; classy and fabulous'. Ms. Trierweiler has shown us she is neither and most of the French public won't blame the president if he opts for the younger, less melodramatic option now that he has clearly been forced into a decision."
Helena Frith Powell, author of Love in a Warm Climate: A Novel about the French Art of Having Affairs

"If he switched 'first girlfriends' and moved Julie Gayet into the Elysee today, I'm sure he'd go up in the popularity polls.
"The majority of us don't give a damn about Hollande having an affair -- it's not really an issue. And the consensus is that since they are not married and don't have children, he is not committed to her. In any case, Gayet is much more presentable and this hospital thing is pure emotional blackmail -- forcing him to choose between the two before the presidential trip to America in two weeks' time."
Charlotte Andreu, French publishing executive

Valerie Trierweiler, pictured (left) in Tulle, south-west France, with Mr Hollande

Well, there it is, the French female verdict on the histrionics of a French First Lady, that she is behaving in a counter-French manner, and she is no lady for her inability to react with a stiff upper backbone. French women, it would appear, are meant to be supine, accepting their debasement/abandonment at the hands of a bored lover or husband, choosing to leave her for someone younger, more vivacious, more attractive; she has lived out her usefulness.

French woman, considering themselves worldly, contemporary, stylishly glamorous and practical see themselves acceptably as an accessory to a man. And if the man chooses to change his accessories to match whatever he feels his appearance should reflect at any given time, it is his prerogative, and a woman must go gently into that lonely dark night to reflect on what it might possibly have been that she did wrong.

So Ms. Powell declares it is her opinion that "Madame Trierweiler has reacted in an extremely un-French manner to the whole thing", and no sympathy need be shed on her behalf. Because men, Frenchmen that is, do that kind of thing, it is expected, and evidently utterly charming, proving the man's virility, that a pompous little skirt-chaser is entitled to shabby treatment of a woman he courted while in a two-decades relationship with an earlier girlfriend who shared four children with him.

On the other hand, perhaps it is Ms. Trierweiler who is deserving of abandonment for her part in persuading her inconstant lover to leave his previous common-law wife, paving the way for her own denouement. Proving that tedious old sentiment: what goes around comes around. Still, there is something about this distasteful episode in the lives of people of celebrity status that sounds familiar; it is the woman and always the woman who suffers. He is celebrated for his presumed virility; she is criticized for her injured female vanity.

As for Ms. Gayet, the latest in French President Francois Hollande's charming little sex-nests, while his plummeted popularity may have enjoyed a slight perk, her perquisite to become a member of a prestigious cultural jury tasked to select artists to receive government grants to stay at France's Medici Institute in Rome was jeopardized. She had been nominated to the post, to be ratified by arts minister Aurelie Filipetti to 'please Holland'. But government officials rushed to deny her the post and her nomination was withdrawn.

Her reward no longer enticingly on the horizon, she is now set to sue French Closer for divulging her affair and in so doing breaching her right to privacy. The matter that remains unsettled of course, is the French taxpayer agreeing to support whoever turns out to be the First Lady once Mr. Hollande makes his final decision -- for the time being -- at an estimated $30,000 monthly. The two women involved each penalized, the man briefly admired and the matter dismissed as French business-as-usual.