At a private lunch last year, 73-year-old Brigitte Macron, wife of the much younger French president, told friends: ‘I’m afraid. Afraid of having done all of this, for him to abandon me.’

Madame Macron’s anxieties and jealousy are infamous within the walls of the Élysée Palace, the official residence of France’s head of state.

Her husband Emmanuel, 25 years her junior, has been linked romantically to a series of rumoured lovers, both male and female, during his time in office.

But Monsieur Macron insists it’s all baseless gossip, the tittle-tattle of a global press obsessed with sex, and he dismisses all the stories.

Most of all, he denies them to his wife – because the one rumour everyone knows to be true is that Brigitte Macron is a furiously possessive woman, whose insecurities are volcanic.

A year ago next week, Brigitte was filmed slapping her husband of 18 years across the face moments before they disembarked from the presidential Airbus A330 jet after it landed in Vietnam on a state visit.

Exactly what had sparked the incident had not been established until last week when a new biography of the Macrons claimed that she had just seen an incriminating video message on her husband’s mobile phone from a sultry Iranian actress.

Boiling with anger, she lashed out. The blow, and Macron’s shocked reaction as he staggered back, was captured by news cameramen.

The new book vividly exposes the volatility of their marriage, the hold that Brigitte exerts over her husband and the importance to France – and by extension, to the whole of the European Union – of keeping the First Lady placated.

Macron confided to the First Lady’s chief of staff, on taking office in 2017: ‘Brigitte needs to be happy. If she’s bored, if she feels useless – if, in the evening when I get home, she tells me she’s unhappy – I won’t be able to cope. And I’ll fail this presidential term.’

The book, Un Couple (Presque) Parfait – which means An (Almost) Perfect Couple – is currently available only in French.

Its author, Florian Tardif, is a young political affairs correspondent at Paris Match, whose frequently scurrilous pronouncements have provoked scandalised delight across the country, and bitter embarrassment within the presidential corridors.

Tardif writes without mercy. ‘Brigitte Macron,’ he says, ‘has always known that women are predators… and that’s why she’s wary of them. This has undoubtedly contributed to the fact that the president is mostly surrounded by men.’

A scan of the list of Macron appointees since he came to power nine years ago certainly confirms this view.

Of the seven prime ministers he has appointed, only one – the matronly Élisabeth Borne – was a woman, and she lasted less than two years.

Tardif dismisses Ms Borne as ‘a Diet Coke addict and compulsive vaper who understood from the outset that she was only there to tick a box’.

The First Lady would often ask to inspect the pictures of women applying for jobs at the Élysée, shouting: ‘Show me!’

If she was not impressed – or wary of their beauty – she would follow up with the words: ‘She won’t be coming to the Élysée!’

This was ‘enough to seal her fate, even before she’s considered,’ writes Tardif. ‘She’s very jealous.’

Last month, US President Donald Trump, angry at France’s refusal to join the American-Israeli war against Iran, mocked Macron as a man whose wife ‘treats him extremely badly, he’s still recovering from the right to the jaw’.

Macron retorted: ‘I am not going to respond,’ adding that such crass comments ‘do not deserve a response’.

He has also blamed ‘crackpot conspiracy theorists’ for seeking to intensify speculation over the state of his marriage, speculation he calls ‘garbage’ – most of all the gossip about ‘Slapgate’.

Officials at the Elysée initially suggested the footage of the slap was fake, only to later admit it was real, but claim it was a sign of ‘closeness and horseplay’ after a 16-hour flight. 

Tardif, however, is convinced Macron had been sending messages to Franco-Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, a 42-year-old known as much for her topless photographs as her films. 

Their relationship, he says, was platonic but deeply affectionate.

Tardif writes: ‘What hurt Brigitte was not so much the content of the message as what it implied: a possibility. 

'A door ajar onto a world she thought she controlled. Nothing tangible, nor truly reprehensible, but the mere idea that it could have existed was enough.’

‘She felt erased,’ said a close friend of Madame Macron’s. ‘And by a much younger woman.’

The actress’s first name might also have been a source of concern. Tardif writes: ‘Her name alone resonates like a taboo. In Persian, gol means “flower”. And shifteh means “in love”. The flower in love.’

Macron is said to have been introduced to Ms Farahani by a journalist and the president ‘thought she was pretty and complimented her’, recounts another source. He sent her texts, including one that allegedly read: ‘I find you magnificent.’

Two months before the flight and the slap, Ms Farahani herself hinted that something might be going on with Macron. 

In an interview with Paris Match, she made cryptic references to the president, while saying: ‘In Iran, too, as in France, when you love someone, you sleep with them.’

‘But yes, there are men who see sex as something you only do with prostitutes. You mustn’t touch your wife because your wife is “beyond” but it’s permissible to go and sleep with prostitutes and have mistresses.

‘In France, too, there’s a culture of having affairs. Why stay with your wife if you’re no longer in love with her?’

She added: ‘My theory is that all French men are stuck with their mothers. Their first wife is the mother they never had and they can’t let go of her.’

Apply those words to Macron, and the effect is devastating.

The 48-year-old president is a full quarter of a century younger than his wife, who still treats him like the boy she first met when he was her pupil at La Providence high school in Amiens, north of Paris, in 1992.

She was 40 and a married drama teacher with three young children at the time, and some claim her relationship with the 15-year-old became ‘dangerously irresponsible’ – but both parties have always denied allegations that their relationship was sexually active at that time.

Madame Macron later admitted that being romantically linked ‘with such a young boy was crippling’, especially in a close-knit, Roman Catholic community, where people never stopped gossiping.

The couple finally wed in 2007, a decade before Macron came from nowhere to win the French presidency as an independent candidate.

Their marriage has always been subjected to hurtful speculation, with Brigitte Macron frequently portrayed as a mother figure to her husband.

‘I have seen the darkness of the world, the stupidity, the wickedness,’ she said in a recent interview.

Madame Macron was particularly hurt by claims she was born a man, and that she and her elder brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux, were the same person.

The rumours were started in 2021 by online trolls, and taken up by the American influencer Candace Owens, who is being sued over her claims by the Macrons in the USA.

Tardif describes how tongues are wagging endlessly inside the Elysée, which is always full of ambitious careerists, and where lustful secret encounters are common. 

In 2020, Brigitte suspected a stunningly beautiful female intern of trying to seduce her husband. 

Staffers nicknamed the young woman ‘Scheherazade’, after the mythical narrator of the Arabian Nights.

Consumed with jealousy and convinced a ‘predator’ was pursuing the president, Madame Macron acted swiftly – instructing officials to fire the 20-something within days. 

A close associate of the First Lady told Tardif: ‘We acted quite quickly’ to ‘protect the presidential couple’.

Tardif claims Ms Macron also ‘got rid of another advisor’ three years later – this time a woman in her thirties who ‘cultivated a reputation as a man-eater, and far from denying it, played up to it.

‘Evening visitors were surprised to see her, at such late hours, in the palace corridors. She probably wanted more.’

Yet some have claimed the Macrons’ marriage is a sham, a cover for his secret gay life. 

Within a few months of taking office, the president was forced to vigorously deny a relationship with his former bodyguard, Alexandre Benalla.

Macron said at the time: ‘Alexandre Benalla has never had the nuclear codes! Benalla has never been my lover!’

The comment was made in response to internet rumours – many emanating from Moscow – that were repeated in the mainstream media.

There were also oft-repeated claims that the paparazzi had compromising pictures of Macron with Mathieu Gallet, the former chairman of Radio France, in a forest.

These also led to denials from Macron, who said: ‘Saying that it is not possible for a man to live with an older woman without being anything other than a homosexual or a hidden gigolo is misogynous. And it’s also homophobic. If I had been homosexual, I would say so and I would live openly.’

Throughout such sagas, Madame Macron has had to put up with regular sneers about how old she was compared to Macron.

She admitted: ‘There are times in your life where you need to make vital choices. Of course, we have breakfast together, me and my wrinkles, him with his youth, but it’s like that.’

What is undeniable is that she has given her husband free rein to act like a young man in all other aspects of his life, beyond romance.

Tardif writes: ‘Over time, the Elysée Palace has taken on a bachelor pad atmosphere. Macron likes it. Brigitte does too, for that matter, finding it amusing and returning the favour with a wink. “I’ll leave you with your friends,” she says, before disappearing into the shadows of a corridor.

‘He stays with a group of close male friends, drinking his favourite tipple – Lagavulin, a 16-year-old Scottish malt whisky. Conversations flow, sometimes becoming bawdy, and stretch on until the end of the night, enveloped by halos of smoke.’

They smoke cigars, as Macron acts ‘like a man from another era… a guy from the 1960s’.

The president, who has a good singing voice, is regularly heard performing songs by the late French superstar Johnny Hallyday.

‘He dislikes his own era – almost despises it,’ writes Tardif of Macron.

‘His century seems small, narrow, and lacking in grandeur. He admires Napoleon, and feels he was born too late. He dreams of the Empire.’

Macron, a former merchant banker and tax inspector, is often referred to as a ‘president of the rich’.

Tardif recounts an alleged private conversation between President Trump and Madame Macron in Washington DC last March, when The Donald suggested her husband had been foolish to give up a highly-paid job in banking to earn far less as a politician.

He also asked her with characteristic bluntness, ‘Why didn’t you leave him?’ The reason is obvious. As Tardif reveals, Brigitte Macron is the power behind the throne.

Macron ‘would not have been President of France’ without his wife, he says. ‘Brigitte has been fundamentally important to him. She is, in a way, his anchor.

Without her, he is a ditherer who can never make his mind up about anything.’

The big question for the Macrons now is what the president will be doing this time next year, when he is forced to step down as president after spending the maximum two terms in office allowed.

He will still be under 50, an age when statesmen are often still trying to reach the pinnacle of their careers.

He could conceivably stand again in 2032, when he will be 55. But by then, Brigitte Macron will be almost 80 and perhaps too elderly for the political fray.

Without her fire and steel, will Emmanuel still be able to contend on the world stage? Or will he be just a lost boy?