It was the last week of May. A bourgeois Parisian dinner party was being held near the Luxembourg Gardens. The evening’s hosts were entertaining three other couples. All were in their seventies and eighties, with the tanned complexions that mark the leisure time of a retired business class that remains proudly active. A tall, light-eyed redhead introduced herself, holding out her hand: “Aude de Thuin, entrepreneur.” This calling card is important to her.
A high priestess of corporate trade shows since the 1980s and the founder, in 2005, of the famed Women’s Forum de Deauville, which brings together the worlds of French and international business, de Thuin is a brand name for a certain generation and milieu. With her lacquered blow-dry, stoles and long necklaces, for years she embodied the women, often from the liberal right, who claim power as a model of feminism, and whose audacity and good-natured elegance enchant the readers of Madame Figaro – the magazine of the conservative daily newspaper Le Figaro.
On that May evening, she and her husband, Hubert Zieseniss, the seemingly perfect couple, were acting true to form: he, 83, the warm but reserved businessman and she, 10 years younger, the fiery event creator, speaking for them both. A few days earlier, on May 22, “under the high patronage of Emmanuel Macron,” she had organized the first regional edition of her latest find, Sistemic, a trade show designed to raise awareness of the under-representation of women in the artificial intelligence sector, at the MuCEM museum in Marseille.
Between courses, the couple talked about their knee issues. Despite their age difference, they both had the same problem and told their guests of their plan to undergo surgery at the same time, at the end of June. The summer would be spent in Paris, with a few weeks of rehabilitation in the same convalescent home, all the better to enjoy some time at their home in Marrakesh in the autumn. Together, as always.
That double medical appointment was never kept. A few days after the dinner, on the morning of June 4, de Thuin called the fire department from the sixth floor of number 82, Boulevard Haussmann, in Paris’s chic 8th arrondissement. Rescuers ascended to the 60-square-meter apartment that the couple had been renting since 2019. There, they discovered Zieseniss’s lifeless body. According to the police, he had died by hanging. De Thuin’s wrists had been slashed. A long, typed letter had been left. There was a lot of blood on the floor.
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