In the days after the election, social media posts went viral criticizing the way the couple have sometimes been portrayed in the press: she as a predatory “cougar” and he as a “boy toy”; Ms. Macron, 64, has been called everything from a grandmother making his tea to a “cagole,” a French term for a bimbo. If the ages were reversed, her defenders pointed out, no one would have blinked an eye.

“Madame Macron’s age is a feminist issue here,” Ms. Henry said. “I was at the hairdresser’s at a very small town in Orléans the day he was appointed minister of economy, and all the ladies were so happy she was so much older than him. We’re so fed up with these older guys with young actresses.”

The Macrons both grew up in the northern city of Amiens, Brigitte Macron as the sixth child of a family whose chocolate business was a local institution founded in 1872. She married a banker in 1974 when she was 21, had two daughters and a son, and taught French, Latin and drama in high school.

Like many schoolboys, Emmanuel Macron developed a crush on his teacher. Ms. Macron, during an interview she gave in 2016 to Paris Match magazine, described falling in love: “I felt that I was slipping, too,” she said. “I then asked him to go to Paris” to finish his education, and his parents were also eager to separate them.

While the age of sexual consent in France is 15, it is illegal for teachers to have sex with students under the age of 18; Ms. Macron told the authors of a book about the couple that they did not consummate the relationship while he was in high school. She declined a request for an interview.

In a documentary aired this week on French television, she said he had called her every day and had gradually worn down her resistance. “He assured me that he would return,” she told Paris Match. “At the age of 17, Emmanuel told me, ‘Whatever you do, I will marry you.’ Love took everything in its path and led me to divorce.”