Julie Gayet and Francois Hollande back together? Actress pictured entering and leaving Elysee palace

French actress Julie Gayet has been pictured entering and leaving the back entrance of the Elysee palace, VSD magazine has reported.

VSD, a weekly gossip magazine, published pictures it said proved that President Francois Hollande spends “almost every night” with Julie Gayet at the French presidential palace.

Julie Gayet, 42, also spent several days this summer with Francois Hollande in La Lanterne – the same Versailles retreat where Valerie Trierweiler, the president’s spurned ex-girlfriend, was sent to recover from a nervous breakdown after revelations over the affair.

President François Hollande, 60, suffered one of the darkest days of his flailing presidency on November 7 after a midterm television bid to persuade the French he can turn the tide was widely panned, and his turbulent private life hit the headlines once again.

Although almost eight million French people tuned into Francois Hollande’s television interview on November 6, precisely halfway through his five-year mandate, the general press consensus was that he had flounced perhaps his “last chance” to win back the French.

Hours after Francois Hollande went onto national television to ask the media to respect his private life following a string of damaging revelations, pictures of a blue Ford Galaxy said to contain Julie Gayet leaving the Elysee hit the news-stands.

In recent months, there have been several reports that Francois Hollande’s relationship with Julie Gayet – a staunch Socialist supporter – was over.

VSD insisted that the relationship was very much back on track and that she sleeps “almost every night at the Elysee”.

“There is no longer any possible doubt: François Hollande and Julie Gayet are still in love,” it wrote.

According to VSD, Julie Gayet arrives almost every evening “around 6.30 PM and leaves the following morning at 8.30 AM”, spending most weekends in the Elysee “making sure she doesn’t stand in front of any windows”.

Francois Hollande’s affair with Julie Gayet was first revealed in January 2014, when Closer magazine published sensational pictures of the president arriving on the back of a moped for secret trysts a stone’s throw from the Elysee, using a helmet as camouflage.

It emerged yesterday, however, that former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who Francois Hollande succeeded at the Elysee in 2012, was aware of the affair two months before it reached the public – sparking speculation he might have been tipped off by an Elysee mole.