Paris : Journalist Valerie Trierweiler attempted to swallow a large dose of sleeping pills after learning that her partner, the French president, Francois Hollande, was having an affair with another woman.
In a book published on Thursday, France’s former first lady said she was stunned and horrified and “just wanted to sleep” after being told of the Hollande’s relationship with actor Julie Gayet.
In her explosive book, Merci Pour Ce Moment (Thank You for the Moment), Trierweiler, 49, describes how she and the president tussled over a plastic bag containing the pills.
She also reveals that after the split, Hollande, 60, sent her flowers and affectionate text messages for months, vowing to win her back.
Extracts from the 330-page book, released by independent publisher Les Arnes and printed abroad amid tight secrecy, were published in Paris Match on Wednesday.
Hollande was reportedly unaware that Trierweiler was writing an account of her seven months at the Elysee Palace.
In it, Trierweiler, who works for Paris Match, revealed how she learned that Hollande was seeing Gayet, 42, after paparazzi photographs of him visiting her apartment on a scooter appeared in January on the front page of the celebrity magazine Closer. Until that moment, she says, Hollande had sworn that rumours of the affair were “nonsense”.
“The news about Julie Gayet was headlining the morning news I cracked. I couldn’t listen to it. I rushed into the bathroom. I grabbed a small plastic bag containing sleeping pills,” she writes.
“Francois followed me. He tried to snatch the bag. I ran into the bedroom. He grabbed the bag and it split. The pills scattered over the bed and the ground. I managed to recover some of them. I swallowed what I could. I wanted to sleep. I didn’t want to live the hours that would follow. I felt the storm that would break over me and I didn’t have the strength to fight it. I lost consciousness.”
Trierweiler was taken to hospital and spent a week “resting”, at the end of which Hollande announced that she was “no longer part of his life”.
However, the journalist says he sent her text messages for months after the split.
“He said he needed me. Each evening he asked me to have dinner with him. He said he wanted to get me back whatever the price. He said he would win me back as if I was an election,” she writes.
Trierweiler says she had confronted Hollande over the Gayet rumours in March 2013 and again in December last year.
“I asked him, ‘swear on my son’s head that it’s not true and I will not speak of it again’. He swore, saying it was ‘a load of nonsense’.”
The publication of the book will dismay the president whose popularity dropped another four points this week. He has refused to make any further comment on the dramatic end to his seven-year relationship with Trierweiler, for whom he left his previous partner Segolene Royal, now ecology minister in his Socialist government.
In another extract, Trierweiler reports how her American counterpart Michelle Obama was jealous when the US president posed for a “selfie” with the Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, and the UK prime minister, David Cameron.
“I’m glad that I’m not the only one who is jealous,” she says in the book, adding: “Everything I have written is true. At the Elysee I sometimes felt as if I was on a reporting assignment. I’ve suffered too much from lies to use them myself.”
