French Farce

The British newspapers today appeared to be enjoying reporting the troubled menage that is, apparently, the contemporary Elysee Palace in Paris. The now very public private lives of M.Hollande and Mlle Trierweiller are certainly not very edifying, and do appear to resemble a soap opera on television, or indeed a Feydeau farce.

Now say what you may about previous French governmental regimes at least the Valois and Bourbons were more stylish in these matters - this was not, for example, how King Louis XV and Mme de Pompadour behaved, or would have thought proper.  The current situation seems so petty bourgeois, which, come to think of it, must be rather galling (Gauling?) for a French Socialist.