BEYOND the issue of who will win, an intriguing question has hovered over today’s poll: will the next leader inhabit the Elysée Palace in central Paris on his - or her - own?

Compared with previous incumbents, Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal have love lives that fall well outside the established presidential mould.

François Hollande, the Socialist party’s secretary-general and father of Royal’s four children, has announced that he would not move into the palace if his common-law spouse of the past 30 years were elected.

This followed Royal’s attempts to discourage suggestions she and Hollande were no longer a couple.

At the same time Paris was being swept with rumours that Cécilia, the wife of the conservative candidate, had gone back to a man with whom she had a much-publicised affair. In an attempt to explain Cécilia’s absence from the campaign last week, Sarkozy said: “It is deliberate.” His family had suffered so much from being in the news, he added, that he wanted to keep them out of the limelight.

Asked what role Cécilia, his second wife and the mother of one of his three children, would play if he were elected, he replied: “We will see.”

A spokeswoman for the UMP, his party, dismissed rumours of Cécilia’s departure, claiming that she would vote with her husband in Paris today and was organising a celebration to be held tonight if her husband qualifies for the second round of voting.

Before leaving him for Richard Attias, a New York advertising executive, in 2005, Cécilia, the daughter of a Russian pianist, had complained of being treated as “a piece of furniture” by Sarkozy. Their reconciliation last year was followed by a blazing row and a second walkout by Cécilia, who was understood to be upset that her husband had conducted an affair in her absence.

She returned in time for the presidential campaign and has been given an office in the team’s headquarters, where she has been keeping a low profile.

“Today Cécilia and I are reunited for good, for real, doubtless for ever,” Sarkozy wrote in his book Testimony last year. Even so, Cécilia has expressed doubts about the attraction of life as “first lady”. “It bores me,” she said. “I am not politically correct.”

The Royal-Hollande relationship, meanwhile, has been complicated by political ambition: Hollande has seemed to have difficulty coming to terms with Royal’s victory in a Socialist primary when he too wanted to run as president.

He has occasionally shared a campaign podium with the candidate, warming up the crowd before handing over the microphone but “Monsieur Royal” refused to appear in a spread of photographs with his lover for a feature about the Royal family at home.

He has said he wants to remain a parliamentarian rather than become a minister in a Royal government.

The French press has traditionally shied away from chronicling the love lives of politicians. François Mitterrand, the former Socialist president, kept a mistress and illegitimate daughter hidden from public view for most of his presidency.

That changed, however, with Cécilia’s extramarital dalliance: the French justified their coverage on the grounds that, as an official adviser to Sarkozy, Cécilia was a part of his team.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the ultra-right National Front candidate, stirred speculation about Cécilia’s whereabouts last week, claiming that the press was too frightened of Sarkozy to report developments in the couple’s tempestuous relationship. In the unlikely event of his own election, Le Pen envisaged a strictly “decorative role” for Jany, his second wife.

François Bayrou, the centrist, seems the candidate with the most conventional domestic arrangements. Were he elected, his wife Elisabeth, a former schoolteacher to whom he has been married for 36 years and with whom he has six children, would divide her time between the couple’s home in the Pyrenees and the Elysée.

Even the likeable Bayrou, a part-time horse breeder, has been plagued by rumours of an affair, however.

Jacques Chirac, the outgoing president, confessed recently to having had relationships with women other than Bernadette, his wife, but emphasised that they were not important. As for Mitterrand, his amorous adventures are legendary.

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