A raunchy sex scene in the French finance minister’s new book has left critics already angry about Emmanuel Macron’s pension overhaul red-faced.
To Bruno Le Maire, everyone in life needs a hobby.
‘Some people go to museums, cinemas, concert halls, football stadiums. Others garden or go hiking,’ Le Maire said on Twitter on April 27, a day after the release of his new book.
‘As for me, I write.’
But it’s what Le Maire wrote in Fugue Américaine which has curled toes, raised eyebrows and taken French officials’ and voters’ breath away.
Or as the French Huffington Post put it: ‘Bruno Le Maire has written about an anus and no one was ready for this.’
The economy and finance minister’s book is about Vladimir Horowitz, an eccentric pianist who spent six decades wowing audiences before his death in 1989, France Info, the country’s public broadcaster, reported.
It’s told through the story of brothers Franz and Oskar Wertheimer going from New York to Cuba to see Horowitz perform at a gig in 1949.
But along the way, Oskar has sex with a woman named Julia and, well, it’s detailed, to say the least.
‘She turned her back to me; she threw herself on the bed; she showed me the brown bulge of her anus,’ Le Marie wrote.
‘”Are you coming Oskar? I’ve never been this dilated”.
‘As she said these words she had the face of an angel; if she was mad with love, I was in ecstasy. For the young student whose sexual experience had until then been limited to sober figures, quickly performed in the dark, Julia was a revelation; she was the light, she was life.’
‘I’ve never been this dilated’ has since become a cheeky rallying cry for workers who, with smouldering anger, have continued to protest against Macron’s controversial pension overhaul.
Macron managed to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62 by resorting to a constitutional trick that let him leapfrog over a full vote in parliament
Now signs and graffiti bore Le Marie’s risqué words on May Day as millions of workers continued to march.
The passage went down on Twitter about as well as you’d expect.
‘URGENT: the government announces the setting up of a psychological unit (accessible from a toll-free number) for all those who have inadvertently come across Bruno Le Maire’s erotic texts,’ tweeted Olivier Varlan, a high-school teacher living in Nord-Pas-de-Calais.
While Paris-based photographer Margal said the minister’s book shows he has ‘too much free time, too much self-confidence to the point of ridicule, an uneasy and bad pen, a superficial and boring sexuality, and pitiful sensory poverty’.
‘I didn’t sleep all night, as soon as I closed my eyes I was in front of a big neon sign that said “brown bulge of her anus”,’ another user replied.
While lecturer Laélia Véron sarcastically said she’s ‘surprised’ that the American credit ratings agency Fitch downgraded France’s debt-worthiness only hours before the minister’s book came out.
Fitch tugged France’s credit rating down from AA to AA- amid political deadlock, social upheaval and stubborn inflation, the agency said.
As one user said: ‘A packet of pasta costs €2.30 euros, but Bruno Le Maire has time to write about the “brown bulge”.’
Le Marie, whose Fugue Américaine is his 13th book, also managed to turn up the heat among opposition politicians as well – though maybe not in the way he hoped.
Francois Ruffin, the MP for the left-wing France Unbowed (LFI) party, said the minister should not have ‘a minute, an hour, a week of his time to devote to writing a book’ when the public is experiencing ‘big worries about inflation’.
Labour minister Olivier Dussopt said he hasn’t read his colleague’s book but said it shows there are ‘feelings… behind the suits of the ministers,’ he told BFMTV.
‘Literature allows me to escape from everyday life, to step back and think differently,’ Le Marie added on Twitter.
‘It is a need worth getting up earlier, going to bed later and devoting your weekends and vacations to.’
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