"You have learn to fight for things.”

Today is French president Emmanuel Macron’s 44^th birthday. In 2017 he told The Telegraph how confronting the challenges to his relationship with Brigitte Trogneux, now his wife, helped form his personal resolve:

“French President Emmanuel Macron is married to Brigitte Trogneux, who is 24 years his senior. They first met when he was only 15 years old and took part in drama plays at the very respectable Jesuit school of La Providence in the quiet, middle-class neighborhood of Amiens, Northern France.

“Macron tells how he fell in love with Trogneux:

“’It was at secondary school, through drama, that I met Brigitte. It was surreptitiously that things happened and that I fell in love. Through an intellectual bond, which day after day became ever closer. Then emerged a lasting passion.’

“It appears that the intellectual bond started when Macron was 15, and that the passionate relationship began when he was 16.

“Brigitte Trogneux recalls that … ‘all the teachers were buzzing about Emmanuel.’ Her own daughter, Laurence, a classmate of Macron’s, also spoke of him as ‘that amazing guy' [… …].

“’Every Friday, for several months, we spent several hours working on a play together,' Macron writes. [ … ] ‘We decided to produce it together. We chatted about everything. [ … ] I felt that we had always known each other.’ [ … ]

“At the time, Trogneux was 39 years old, married, and the mother of three children. Emmanuel was succeeding at school with disconcerting ease. Girls did not seem to be his main interest. His parents remember only one girlfriend. [ … ]

[Emmanuel’s father] “was ‘surprised’ all the same and ‘almost fell off his chair’ when he learned about his son’s relationship. His mother admits: ‘When Emmanuel met Brigitte, we certainly did not say: “how wonderful!”’ Emmanuel’s grandmother, however, was ‘very conciliatory.’

“Macron’s parents, a bit shaken, decided to meet Trogneux and ask her not to see their son until he had reached adulthood. His father, however, was not convinced this was the right response. ‘I thought it could even have an adverse effect.’ But his wife insisted, and so he told Trogneux: ‘I forbid you to see him until he turns 18.’ ‘I can’t promise you anything,' Trogneux answered tearfully. [ … ].

“As it happened, Emmanuel was due to go to Paris to complete his final year at secondary school. Was the decision motivated or accelerated by his romance with Brigitte? Did his parents see this as a way of getting him away from his beloved? Both deny it, rejecting any version of the romance in which they would have ‘kicked their son out of the house.’

[… …]

“’It is very hard,' he says. ‘An experience like that makes you think... You have to learn to fight for things, to bear the burden and have a life which does not in any way correspond to other people’s lives. That was what we went through for fifteen years. We managed to achieve the situation we’re in today, because we knew it was what we wanted. It didn’t just happen all by itself.’”

Source: Anne Fulda, “The Macron affair: How the French election winner’s parents discovered he was dating his teacher.” The Telegraph, 2017. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/relationships/macron-affair-french-presidential-candidates-parents-discovered/ Quoted in T. Rivas, Positive Memories. Still available for now from lulu.com at https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/t-rivas/positive-memories/paperback/product-24450434.html?page=1&pageSize=4