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Alexis Kohler, the president’s chief of staff, acknowledged that the Elysee’s initial decision to punish Benalla with a two-week suspension might “appear insufficient,” but said that at the time it had seemed “proportionate.” It was only after Le Monde broke the story that the bodyguard was sacked and charged with assault and impersonating a police officer.

Macron’s response to the media and opposition frenzy was typically haughty. When he did finally deign to respond, he said his aide had made a “huge, serious error,” but added defiantly: “If they are looking for the person responsible, it’s me and me alone. Let them come and get me.”

Photo by Tahar Bouhafs/AFP/Getty Images

He dismissed the affair as a “storm in a teacup” and launched a Trump-like attack on the media for talking “rubbish,” saying that it “no longer seeks the truth.”

But then came that curious denial that he was not Benalla’s lover.

It was not the first time Macron, 40, who is married to his former teacher, a woman 20 years his senior, has had to protest that he is not homosexual.

During last year’s presidential campaign he laughed off rumours that he once had a gay affair.

But his jokes and his playing down of the scandal have not gone down well. Polls show that 80 per cent of his French citizens are “shocked” at the goings-on, and 66 per cent want him to address the nation to explain himself.

Macron, whose model Jupiter was also the god of sky and of thunder, left the political turmoil behind him on Thursday when he flew out on working visits to Spain and Portugal.

But the crack and rumble of the thunder of the Benalla scandal await him when he returns to Paris this weekend.