Melanie McDonagh: Everything is cracked at the Elysée palace

Those of us of an impulsive bent can feel only awe at the reports of Valérie Trierweiler’s world-class tantrum when the French president apparently let her know he had been seeing Julie Gayet, an actress seven years younger than she. The invaluable Closer magazine ran a headline: “The truth about the clean-up which cost the state three million euros”.

Among the treasures shattered when Ms Trierweiler gave free rein to her emotions was, reportedly, a Louis XVI Sèvres vase. Since then, a French government spokesman has denied the reports and Ms Trierweiler’s lawyer, Frédérique Giffard, yesterday dismissed them as “crazy”.

Unfortunately, minutes after Miss Giffard spoke, an enraged Valérie tweeted Europe 1 radio to declare: “[Miss Giffard] spoke without knowing and without receiving a mandate to do so. She is no longer my legal counsel.” Except it may have been her lawyer’s suggestion that she was seeking a “dignified” exit from her relationship with Mr Hollande that annoyed her, not the denials about smashing the Republic’s china.

Perhaps she should clarify matters. If not £2.5 million worth of damage, perhaps just a million? Ormolu chairs rather than a 200-year-old vase? Given Ms Trierweiler’s sensitivity, I think Mr Hollande must take his share of the blame for not breaking the bad news in, say, the Elysée gardens rather than an office filled with breakable and irreplaceable ornaments that don’t belong to him.

The fabulous aspect of it all is that it gives a spurious public interest aspect to an affair that is utterly compelling merely from a human interest point of view. If the president’s mistress is smashing the property of the state, that gives Closer magazine a perfectly valid reason for taking an interest in the relationship. If I were on the equivalent of the French Public Accounts Committee, I’d be getting on the case right now, to work out the bill.

But then this affair has never been short of a public-interest dimension. Before she was sacked, Valérie Trierweiler’s lawyer suggested it was very important that Valerie should continue her public work.

“She is very preoccupied by her commitment [as First Lady] to humanitarian associations in the fight against sexual violence whose victims are African women.” Oh right. So in the interests of the campaign against, say, rape as a weapon of war, Valérie must remain just where she is, with her five staff and an entire wing of the Elysée. Terminating the relationship would thus be almost morally wrong.

The truth is, of course, that Ms Trierweiler is in a humiliating, counter-feminist situation for a modern woman of occupying a position entirely contingent on the favour of a powerful man, which is essentially based on her sexual appeal for him. All the cant about humanitarian work can’t disguise that.

And she’s in no position to complain, either. Mr Holland deserted his quasi-wife, Ségolène Royal, his companion of 30 years and mother of his four children, for her about seven years ago. This affair is untidy precisely because the US-style amorphous title of First Lady, intended for the presidential spouse, doesn’t turn a partner or girlfriend into a wife.

Meanwhile, it’s an ill wind. Apparently sales of the motorcycle helmet that Mr Holland used when travelling to his trysts with Ms Gayet have sold out.