It offers an insider’s insight into France’s ultimate power couple and the extraordinary dynamic between Brigitte and her husband, almost 25 years her junior and her former pupil at a Jesuit-run provincial school in northern France.

Written by Gaël Tchakaloff, an award-winning political biographer who built a friendship with Brigitte over five years, it portrays the fierce closeness and intensity of the Macrons’ relationship. Her husband is seen to rely on her wisdom, guidance and coaching, which helped to steer him into the presidency as a relative unknown in 2017.

Love Macron or loathe him, the French are fascinated by their relationship, which echoes that of Bill and Hillary Clinton in the early years of his presidency, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, or Margaret and Denis Thatcher. 

The Macrons’ unusual age gap fuels endless off-colour jokes at her expense, and persistent rumours that Macron is gay, placing enormous strain on them as a couple and individually.

A well-known French filmmaker, who is himself gay and has attended dinner parties with the couple over the years, told me after the last election that the rumours were wide of the mark: “They are a genuine couple. They’ve got a really close bond. He wants his maman.”

A scathing assessment, perhaps, but the portrait that emerges from Tchakaloff’s book, Tant Qu’on est Tous les Deux (“While We’re Alone”), is of what the French call a “fusional” couple who are mutually dependent. You get a sense that Macron would feel lost without Brigitte by his side. 

Tchakoloff, who frequented the Macrons’ home for nearly five years, writes: “There is never an hour and a half that passes without them talking to one another.”

An exaggeration? When I ask her, Tchakaloff acknowledges that this is “a figure of speech”.

“What I wanted to convey was that they talk as often as they can, day and night,” she tells me. “Her office is in the “Madame wing” on the ground floor of the Élysée. He works on the first floor, so they’re constantly popping in to see each other. When he’s travelling, he phones her all the time.”

This chimes with accounts I received, off the record, from Macron’s aides during the early years of his presidency, the so-called ‘Mormons’ who helped propel him into power.

Some said he grew anxious if he couldn’t contact Brigitte. If he spent a day in meetings and agreed on a course of action, they said he would sometimes change his mind after discussing the issue with her overnight. They found it frustrating because they felt that she had to approve every move. Some tried to go through her to influence him, with mixed success.

“They have a shared schedule,” Tchakaloff writes. “They know minute by minute what the other is doing. They are convinced that being a couple vastly enhances your individuality.”

Macron is sometimes criticised for being arrogant and condescending, but Tchakaloff says his personality is more complex. The burden of his office weighs heavily, and she tells me he has a habit of biting his nails to the quick when stressed.  

If Brigitte is, in many ways, a motherly presence in his life, protecting him, shoring up his confidence and setting him straight on issues she thinks he hasn’t fully grasped, what of his real mother, a doctor?

The first chapter opens with a rare interview with Françoise Noguès, who we learn “idolises” her son and enjoys a close relationship with Brigitte, despite her early misgivings when she discovered that the schoolboy Emmanuel was pursuing his teacher.

When he’s travelling, Dr Noguès is “afraid he’ll be stabbed, as he always agrees to selfies”. And she is traumatised by protesters’ effigies of the president under the guillotine.

She is proud of her son’s achievements, but believes he hasn’t yet found his true calling and will eventually quit politics. “I really wish that he’ll have a different life after the Élysée”, the author quotes her as saying. “I’m convinced that he’ll turn to writing.” 

When I ask Tchakaroff to characterise the relationship between Brigitte and Emmanuel, she says it is “a romantic, loving one, but also very cerebral”.

“They’re both prodigiously intelligent and they connect on many different levels, but they’re also romantic characters. They both love literature and their approach to life is very literary. When you talk to Brigitte or Emmanuel, their conversation is full of literary allusions. My book is not a political book, it’s a book about love. When I saw them together — and they were often together — they were always touching and kissing each other on the cheek.”

She considers Brigitte to be a friend, she tells me. “But I don’t know if that’s how she sees me. When you’re involved in politics, you don’t have friends.”

Tchakaloff met the Macrons in 2016, the year before Emmanuel became president. For years she saw them regularly and often accompanied them on trips. The Macrons did not want her to write the book, and the president’s advisors phoned her to ask her to stop. A staffer said she was “as dangerous as nitroglycerin”.

At one point, Macron cut off her access to him, but relented after Brigitte reluctantly accepted that the book would be written following a stormy phone call with Tchakaloff in which she said she did not want her privacy violated. “I don’t want us to be talked about. I don’t want our relationship laid bare,” she told the author. 

The author says she no longer sees the Macrons. She is waiting for their reaction to the book, which quotes an anonymous cabinet member as saying the president “lacks confidence in himself and is surrounded by a circle of men without quality.” 

It also contains a withering assessment of Macron’s performance by a former president, who is not named but is almost certainly François Hollande, Macron’s former mentor and boss who is known to feel he was betrayed by Macron as the younger man rose to the top. “He believes in nothing. He has no convictions,” says the former president. “Macron has neglected La République en Marche, his start-up party which governs the country, allowing it to become an empty shell.

For her part, Tchakaloff rejects her reputation as a troublemaker who charmed her way into the Élysée. “For me, it was a choice between loyalty and the truth,” she says. “I chose the truth.”