France and a first lady, and a second, and...

Paris: As a candidate for the French presidency in 2012, Francois Hollande promised to be more boring spouse than flamboyant seducer.

Determined to set himself apart from the man he was seeking to unseat - Nicolas Sarkozy, whose marriage to former supermodel Carla Bruni had helped make him tabloid fodder - Hollande proclaimed, "I, president of the republic, will make sure that my behavior is exemplary at every moment."

Twenty months into his presidency, Hollande's campaign pledge is faring even less well than the unemployment-cursed French economy.

Caught in a clandestine affair that is more bedroom farce than Shakespearean drama - a beautiful actress, a scorned woman at home, surreptitious comings and goings on a most unpresidential scooter - Hollande is testing the limits of France's famous tolerance for private indiscretion and leaving himself vulnerable to ridicule.

The episode has revealed a colder, more politically calculating side to Hollande, familiar to those around him but largely hidden from public view. His judgment, not least about his personal security, has been called into question.

Already weighed down by historically low support in the polls, he also faces the challenge of keeping the affair from undercutting his ability to push through an ambitious new agenda aimed at restoring France's fading global competitiveness and moving his Socialist Party to the center.

One big test could come next month, when he will travel to Washington for a state visit with President Barack Obama. Hollande's official partner, Valerie Trierweiler, was scheduled to accompany him in her role as de facto first lady, but now the visit seems likely to attract considerable attention for his eventual choice of, or lack of, a traveling companion.

"He's always hated when politics turned into a spectacle, and now he finds himself right in the middle of one," Julien Dray, a Socialist and former deputy in Parliament, said in an interview. "The question is how he will handle it over the long term. If this becomes vaudeville, it could damage his presidency."

Hollande, 59, has had little respite since a magazine, Closer, caught him meeting at an apartment around the corner from the Elysee Palace with Julie Gayet, a 41-year-old film actress who has played roles as varied as a Foreign Ministry official, a hairdresser and an addict, with nude scenes. The magazine published pictures of him arriving for his trysts on a scooter, wearing a helmet with the visor down, but apparently recognizable by his sensible black lace-up shoes.

The French public at first took the revelations in their usual sexually sophisticated stride, but not Trierweiler. People who know her well said she was so devastated by the news that she checked herself into a hospital.

Hollande visited only once during her eight-day stay. Since leaving the hospital over the weekend (and thanking supporters via Twitter for their good wishes), she has been resting at La Lanterne, the presidential getaway at Versailles. Paris Match, where Trierweiler has remained employed as a journalist even while serving as Hollande's official consort, reported on its website that the president had asked her for more time.

Hollande said Monday in a news conference in the Netherlands that Trierweiler was "getting better," but he did not respond to the question of whether she was France's first lady, according to reports by news services.

If he does leave her, it would be his second high-profile breakup in seven years, after the end of his 25-year relationship with Segolene Royal, a Socialist Party presidential candidate in 2007 and the mother of their four children.

Hollande's personal drama was playing out over the past two weeks as he was making one of the most substantive decisions of his term so far, proposing to cut corporate taxes and reduce public spending, moves that unnerved the left wing of his Socialist Party but also drew plaudits from the business world.

The confluence of the two story lines made Hollande, who had been caricatured as wobbly as a popular French custard, into a more complex figure.

To his supporters, this is the start of a new chapter for Hollande in which he is emerging as a more mature and pragmatic leader who may be freed from what had become a complicated relationship with Trierweiler.

They are banking on the assumption that what would be a media circus to a US president will be treated as a sideshow by the French, and that the story will die down.

"There is a new Hollande, more in harmony with himself," said one of his close friends.

Much will depend on what happens in the coming weeks, especially whether Trierweiler speaks publicly. As Hollande toured his political constituency of Tulle in central France over the weekend, he was trailed by 90 reporters, almost all French. He declined to answer the few questions that were posed about his personal life.

But more than his predecessors in the pre-Twitter era, who could count on journalists to keep most private behavior by public officials out of the limelight, Hollande now finds himself operating in a climate of more intensive and intrusive scrutiny.

Perhaps more worrisome for him is that potentially his support among women could erode.

"This makes the French look like idiots," said Arlette da Rocha, who runs the restaurant Le Pressoir in Tulle, where Hollande started his political career. "He has to tell the truth. This unconventional behavior in his private life doesn't give a clean image of the president."

Hollande long seems to have assumed that he could live by his own rules.

As leader of the Socialist Party, he campaigned for Royal when she ran for president in 2007. Both of them hid the fact that he had already left her for Trierweiler. French journalists who knew about the breakup did not write about it until Royal announced it after the election.

"He who has betrayed will betray," Royal said afterward.

Hollande has never been the marrying kind - a rarity for high-ranking politicians, although not for many French couples. Not that Royal was unwilling to tie the knot. Asked about marriage in a joint television interview in 2006 during the prelude to her presidential campaign, she replied mischievously: "We love each other, so I'm expecting him to propose. Francois, do you want to marry me?"

Hollande chuckled, awkwardly, and said nothing.

"You see - he still hesitates!" Royale said.

"No, this is not what I mean," Hollande said. "I'll answer you after the program."

Apparently his answer was no.

Hollande never married Trierweiler, even though he described her in an interview with Gala magazine in October 2010 as "the woman of my life." By the following February, he had curbed his enthusiasm. "The sentence was maladroit," he said. "I should have said, 'She is the woman of my life today.'"

Not only did he not marry Trierweiler when he became president, he also agreed that she could keep working for Paris Match, although she stopped covering politics. Hollande and his aides depicted it as an example of a modern partnership rather than a conflict of interest. She was installed as the de facto first lady with offices in the east wing of the Elysee Palace, a staff of four and a monthly budget of about $27,000.

Early in his presidency, Hollande wanted the freedom to move in and out of the Elysee Palace as he pleased. In "So Far, Everything's Going Badly," a new book on the Hollande presidency, the author, Cecile Amar, said that shortly after Hollande was elected, he asked members of the Elysee staff, "How do I get out without people seeing me?"

Concerned that he might try to escape the Elysee on his motor scooter, his aides sold it, Amar wrote.

He took the high-speed train to a European summit meeting in Brussels against the wishes of his security staff, and insisted on living mostly in the apartment he shares with Trierweiler - with large exposed bay windows - which had to be secured.

He quickly made some concessions: He stopped taking trains and abandoned his pledge that his motorcade would stop at red lights like ordinary motorists (an obvious security risk).

But he still believes he knows best about his security. "I go around when and where I want as I want," he said at his news conference last week.

Interviews with more than a dozen friends and political colleagues suggest that Hollande often deflects deeper questions about his character and his personal life.

Hollande once confessed his unwillingness or inability to reveal himself. "You ask me who I am," he said in a news conference in May, replying to a narrow question about his political ideology in broader terms. "That's a terrible question."

(Scott Sayare contributed reporting)