“She’s in shock,” say Brigitte Macron’s friends. “Nothing quite prepared her for the attention.”

In the middle of the French presidential election, the entire world seems to have focused on the 24-year age difference, in the “wrong” direction (Melania Trump, anyone?), between the likely future president, 39, and his glamorous 64-year-old wife, once his high school drama teacher.

The French, helped by a clever two-year campaign orchestrated by Paris’s best celebrity media agent (a personal friend of Bibi’s, as Brigitte Macron is known) have by now “normalised” the Macrons. At this stage, we’re wondering why the only question seems to hang on the age difference.