The news of the death of André-Louis Auzière was known ten months late.
The name may not say anything to almost anyone.
He is one of the most enigmatic characters in the life of Emmanuel Macron, the French president.
Auzière was the first husband of Brigitte Trogneux - the maiden name of the French first lady - and the father of her three children.
Trogneux left Auzière in 1994, after 20 years of marriage, for a boy whom she taught drama at La Providence school, the Jesuit school in the city of Amiens, in northern France.
Brigitte was 40 years old;
Emmanuel, 16. They ended up getting married in 2007 and, together, they conquered power ten years later.
The romance, which at the time caused a scandal in the provincial and had to face the objections of their respective families, became a campaign claim.
It demonstrated the aura of the candidate, his thirst for freedom and his aura of a character from a 19th century novel.
A huge void, however, surrounded André-Louis Auzière.
He never spoke in public.
The Macron did not mention him.
What did you do after the separation?
Where he lived?
A great silence settled around the ex-husband of the French first lady.
Until last week their youngest daughter, Tiphaine Auzière, broke the news in a statement to the weekly
Paris Match:
“My father died.
I buried him on December 24 in the strictest privacy. "
André-Louis and Brigitte had been married on June 22, 1974 in Le Touquet, the exclusive coastal town in northern France where the Amiens bourgeoisie have their second homes.
Brigitte belonged to one of those illustrious families, the Trogneux, owners of Maison Jean Trogneux, the most famous chocolate shop in the region.
André-Louis, born in Cameroon, was the son of a French colonial official.
From the marriage three children will be born: Sébastien in 1975, Laurence in 1977 and Tiphaine in 1984. He is employed at the Credit du Nord bank;
she finishes her studies of letters.
A few years later, they move to Alsace for work reasons.
There she begins to teach Language and Literature classes in a private school and discovers her vocation.
Returning to Amiens in the early 1990s, again for the work of André-Louis, Providence hires Brigitte.
The three children of the Auzière couple enter the same center.
The students adore her: she succeeds in making literature something alive;
They compare her to the teacher played by Robin Williams in the movie
Dead Poets Club
.
His bedside book is
Madame Bovary
, by Gustave Flaubert, the story of a woman married to a rural doctor whom she does not love and who dreams of living in the romantic world of novels.
One day, her middle daughter, Laurence, tells her about an unusual classmate: "He's crazy: he knows everything and about anything."
The "madman" is called Emmanuel Macron.
In the theater workshop, run by
Madame
Auzière, the young prodigy immediately stands out.
And something happens.
The story - on Friday afternoons writing a play together;
the rumors in the school first and in Amiens later;
Emmanuel's forced exile to Paris, and his promise to his beloved: "I will return and marry you" - has been counted a thousand times and is already part of Macronian mythology.
“Separations always cause damage.
Children often suffer, ”Brigitte Macron told
Elle
magazine years later
.
But he added: "If I hadn't made this decision, it would have passed my life by."
What has been hidden in this story is the other part: that of the banker, husband and father of a family who one day discovers that his wife has fallen in love with a teenager.
It is known that, after separating, she worked in the city of Lille for a season, that her public trail was lost and that the divorce became official in 2004. Little more.
In
Il venait d'avoir 17 ans
(He
had just turned 17
), one of the most detailed investigations into this aspect of the biography of the president and the first lady, the author, Sylvie Bommel, quotes several people who crossed paths with him.
"Sympathetic".
"Nice".
"Lovely".
"Tall and thin".
"Intelligent".
"Discreet".
"At dinners, he always let his wife speak, he didn't say a word."
"A rigorous man, very upright, always ready to help a colleague."
"A little taciturn."
"Nothing funny".
Bommel recalls Flaubert's phrase about André-Louis about Madame Bovary's husband: "Charles's conversation was flat as a street sidewalk."
Today the seven grandchildren of André-Louis and Brigitte call
Emmanuel Macron
daddy -
grandfather. And it can be said that, in a time of media overexposure and exhibitionism on social networks, that mysterious man achieved a not inconsiderable success: eclipsing himself in life. "I adored him, he was a separate being, an anti-conformist attached above all to anonymity," says Tiphaine Auzière in
Paris Match
. "You have to respect it."
