HE IS the one-time bodyguard who married the princess he was paid to protect. She is a former Miss France who was expected to marry the country’s most popular news reader this coming autumn.

But photographs of Daniel Ducruet, 42, and Nathalie Marquay, 38, caught in “tender complicity” on the beach at Cap d’Ail, on the Riviera, have switched France’s love of a summer soap opera from the television screen to real life in the past week.

Their romance, which began publicly enough on the small screen, has dominated tabloid newspaper tales and highbrow commentaries alike, and is seen as another blow to that Gallic sense of propriety that, until recently, left the private lives of celebrities and public figures immune from revelation and public examination.

M Ducruet was bodyguard to Princess Stephanie of Monaco, 40, and is the father of her two children, Louis, 13, and Pauline, 11. He was also briefly the husband of the Princess until he was caught in 1996 cavorting naked with a former Miss Topless Belgium and was banished from the palace by the late Prince Rainier, then his father-in-law.

Nathalie Marquay, 38, won the Miss France title in 1987. She is also the companion of Jean-Pierre Pernaut, 55, the much-loved face of lunchtime television news on the national channel TF1, and the mother of his two young children.

French viewers were first given a ringside seat for the start of their “complicity” in the spring when M Ducruet, who is known as un serial lover, joined Mme Marquay in La Ferme des Célébrités, a television reality show in which minor or fading stars are locked together in a rundown Provençal farm.

But the beach photographs are seen as confirmation that the liaison has persisted beyond the requirements of televisual thrills.

While glossy magazines and tabloids are exciting readers with the plot, higher-brow commentators see France falling ever deeper into the “Anglo-Saxon” obsession with “le people”, as celebrities are called.

“France is with you, Jean-Pierre,” shouted the headline in yesterday’s Voici, un magazine people, which has taken the side of M Pernaut.

In France Soir, Genviève de Fontenay, the veteran chief of the Miss France organisation, said: “I am shocked, irritated and above all hurt for Jean-Pierre.” The French version of Julia Morley deplored Mme Marquay’s alleged infidelity.

The avuncular M Pernaut, who has presented the news for 17 years, has slunk home alone to Paris. His neighbours in his native Picardy are telling the media that they deplore the way he has been treated by the woman whom he was hoping to marry in the autumn.

Both M Ducruet and Mme Marquay have issued carefully worded denials of impropriety as they continue their holidays. Mme de Fontenoy was especially shocked because the former Miss France was flaunting her liaison with the handsome, tattooed M Ducruet, who is now carving a career on Italian television. “You can always have affairs, but you do it discreetly,” she said.

Times Recommends

• Rio Tinto four held as China prepares case
• Diplomats must keep heads down and trousers up
• When in Rome should one make like Berlusconi?