Former President François Hollande’s “love scooter” sold for more than 20,000 euros at auction

The Piaggio that the former president used to meet Julie Gayet was sold at auction on Sunday to the director of an automobile museum. “Madness”, according to the Rouillac house which organized the sale.

The “scooter of love”, this 125 cubic centimeters which already made the cover of the magazine in 2014 Closer, printed in one million copies. The old scooter of the Élysée used, as indicated in the announcement of the Rouillac house responsible for the auction, by François Hollande “to join incognito and gallantly the actress Julie Gayet, rue du Cirque, on New Year’s Day 2014“, was sold at auction on Sunday May 26. Julie Gayet and the former president are still in perfect love today, according to their Instagram accounts.

It had been several years since the Piaggio de l’Élysée, with 34,000 kilometers on the clock, left the gold of the Republic, having changed hands several times since. Its last owners, Patrick and Manola, had given it to themselves as a gift to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary, and François Hollande had made a small dedication to them in his book Upheavals : “To Patrick and Manola who had the chance to ride my scooter to better share their happiness. CThis scooter is the right one.

“A legendary vehicle” which tells, according to the Rouillac house, “the story of a man like any other, and of a nation torn between its desire for power and the realization of its downgrading”. In any case, symbol of downgrading or not, many buyers on Sunday wanted to go home riding the scooter of love. A scooter which marked a part of the history of France, that of the great love stories, not so secret, at the highest summit of the State: of Agnès Sorel, lover of Charles VII and first royal favorite officially recognized, to Madame de Maintenon, clandestine wife of Louis XIV, via Diane de Poitiers, sent into exile by her rival Catherine de Medici on the death of Henri II.

For the Elysée scooter, the romance, the romantic cataclysms and the secret escapades are over because on Sunday, at the Château d’Artigny, he is the director of a museum, not of love, but of automobiles, near Cholet, which won the auction, for 20,500 euros. “Madness“, according to the Rouillac house, for an old scooter listed for less than 1,300 euros at Argus. But wasn’t it already madness for a President of the Republic in office to appear at dawn, in the street, a kraft paper bag of croissants in hand? François Hollande followed the auction live and will perhaps one day come to visit Cholet on his scooter, a symbol of downgrade perhaps, but also, without a doubt, of a certain fury for life.