Valérie Trierweiler protests that she still loves Francois Hollande, the French president, after he unceremoniously dumped her and she quit the Elysée Palace. How much longer before Hollande himself gets his marching orders? She was one of the most publicly hated women in France, considered hard-nosed and conniving. Indeed, there was one famous incident on the provincial campaign trail when a middle aged woman approached Hollande and told him in non uncertain terms not to marry that woman! Now of course, she is seen as very much the victim in the whole affair. Now, many people in France are getting a laugh at her expense: a television presenter in Gabon, west Africa, made an unintentional mistake when she named the French President’s former partner as Valérie Rottweiler!
Last Sunday afternoon,a big protest march took place in Paris, from the Bastille to Les Invalides. The group called themselves France en Colere or angry France and they called for the immediate firing of Hollande as president. They are planning a second big protest, after the municipal elections across France in March, for which the Front Nationale is way ahead of any other party in the opinion polls, with an estimated 23 per cent support. Hollande’s latest moves, like declaring that the people of France will be able to vote in a referendum as to whether Turkey should be admitted to the EU, are little more than a distraction.
The march the other day attracted 17,000 people according to the police, who had to deal with a riotous outcome,whereas the organisers put the figure at 120,000. Now Béatrice Bourges, spokesperson for the Printemps France group, says she is going to go on a hunger strike outside the National Assembly until such time as Hollande steps down. As she says herself, article 68 of the French constitution says that if members of both the National Assemnly and the Senate agree that the president should quit because of grave failings, he has no option but to do so. Ironically, Printemps France has little to do with the Arab Spring and a lot to do with opposition to homosexual marriage.
In the meantime, one of the key pledges of Hollande has turned out to be worthless, like so much else he has promised. He has long said that unemployment would come down by the end of the year 2013. In fact, it has gone up slightly and now stands at 3.3 million.
So now Hollande is officially in the Elysée Palace as a bachelor. The number of French heads of state who’ve been bachelors is mighty small. In the earlier part of the 19th century, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was president of the second republic. While he was in power, he was a notorious philanderer, while still officially a bachelor, although in later life, he did marry. Then the now forgotten Gaston Doumergue, who was president from1924 to 1931, was also a bachelor, although he married his long standing mistress just 12 days before he left office. Nicolas Sarkozy has a brief spell in the Elysée when he was between wives and now there’s Francois Hollande.
At least Valérie Trierweiler didn’t do anything too drastic - stories about her smashing a Sevres vase to pieces as part of a €3 million trail of destruction in the presidential palace, in rage at finding what lover boy Hollande was doing with his latest conquest, have all been officially denied. Back in 1914, just on the eve of the first world war, Le Figaro newspaper published letters from Joseph Caillaux, who had been prime minister from 1911 to 1912, to the woman who became the second Mme Caillaux, while he was still married to his first wife. She took such exception to what the newspaper editor had done that she shot him dead. In July, 1914, she was acquitted of murder on the grounds that it was a crime passionel.
Meanwhile in the south of France, the Cote d’Azur has been battered by storms and high winds, which caused a lot of flooding in the Var, on the western fringes of the Cote d’Azur. Lots of roads have been blocked by landslides across the region, even in Nice and Menton. Meanwhile, the other night in the Lot valley, close to Rodez, which is 600 km due south of Paris, a earthquake measuring 3.9 on the Richter scale shook the landscape, but caused no damage or casualties.
January 28th was the 75th anniversary of the death in the south of France of the great Irish poet, W.B.Yeats, considered by many to have been one of the greatest in the English language. He and his wife had been spending their second winter near Menton, because of Yeats' bronchial condition. He also had heart trouble and a hernia. The winter of 1938/39 was abnormally severe in France, including on the Cote d’Azur, so nothing new in all this bad weather down south. Yeats and his wife were staying modestly in a little hotel in Rocquebrune Cap Martin, just outside Menton. The hotel was called the Idéal Séjour and it then offered cheaply priced accommodation. These days, the premises has been much upgraded to the Résidence Le Louisiane, where an apartment costs between €700 and €900 a week.
On January 28, 1939, Yeats died in this hotel, watched over by both his wife and his last mistress. He was buried nearby and wasn’t brought back to Ireland for burial until 1948. Today, he lies in the Church of Ireland graveyard at Drumcliffe, in the shadow of Ben Bulben and even today, doubts persist as to whether the right body was brought back from the south of France.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Ireland, the jokes continue. A state company called Irish Water is being set up to provide water services to everyone and the amount of taxpayers’ money that is being used to pay for consultants and a whole lot of other hangers-on is absolutely mind blowing. Someone wrote in to The Irish Times the other day to say that while the Biblical story of water being turned into wine is well-known, the Irish have managed the unique trick of of turning water into gravy, as in gravy train! When I was in a shop the other day, the elderly man in front of me was complaining generally about service and he said, quite simply: ”We always do everything upside down in Ireland”!
And talking of jokey spellings, the other day, I spotted an off licence in Dublin with a sign in the door: ”For entry, press the buzzer and pull the handel”. I’m sure that if the original Mr Handel was around, he would have been much amused.
In the meantime,all we have to do back in France is wait for the roof to fall in on the Elysée!