France’s First Lady Brigitte Macron has revealed how she waited for years before marrying Emmanuel to avoid ‘wrecking’ her children’s lives.
Speaking in a rare interview with Paris Match magazine, the 70-year-old said she delayed marrying her husband French President Emmanuel Macron, 45, for ten years for the sake of her three children, who are around the same age as her younger partner.
Macron was 15 when he fell in love with the then-married Brigitte Auzière, 25 years his senior. The first lady was his drama teacher at the Catholic Providence school in Amiens, in northern France, and her daughter, Laurence, was Macron’s classmate.
Macron’s parents, who weren’t in support of their relationship, had to send him to Paris to go to another school, but yet he still desired to be with his teacher.
She said she told herself that, once Emmanuel was in Paris, he would ‘fall in love with someone his [own] age’, but that didn’t happen.
Brigitte gave up her job, but said the ‘only obstacles’ were her children, as she didn’t want to ‘wreck their lives’.
‘That lasted ten years, the time to put them on the rails. You can imagine what they were hearing. But I didn’t want to miss out on my life,’ she said.
Her son is three years older than Macron and her daughters, now aged 46 and 39, are of similar age to her second husband.
She also added that she doesn’t know what her parents would have said about her marriage to her former student, but noted that her siblings would sometimes joke about the gossip surrounding her and Macron’s relationship.
She finally married Macron, a civil servant in his late twenties at the time in 2007, after divorcing her estranged husband André-Louis Auzière the year before.
The First Lady gave a little more insight into the Macrons’ married life, which she usually remains tight-lipped about apart from mentioning the difficulties in the early years of their relationship were.
Despite already being married for 16 years, Brigitte said her husband still manages to surprise and amaze her with his impressive memory and intelligence.
‘I had many brilliant pupils and none had his capability. I have always admired him,’ she explained.
