They were just playfighting.
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That was French President Emmanuel Macron 's explanation on Monday for video images that appeared to show his wife, Brigitte, pushing her husband away with both hands on his face before they disembarked from their plane to start a tour of Southeast Asia this weekend.
The moment quickly made headlines in France, with media trying to decipher the interaction that cameras spotted through the just-opened door of the plane.
The headline of a story on the website of the daily Le Parisien newspaper asked: "Slap or 'squabble'? The images of Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron disembarking in Vietnam trigger a lot of comment."
Macron later told reporters that the couple married since 2007 after meeting at the high school where he was a student and she was a teacher were simply joking around.
"We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife," he said, adding that the incident was being overblown into "a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe."
In video taken by The Associated Press as the Macrons arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Sunday, a uniformed man can be seen pulling open the plane door and revealing the president standing inside, dressed in a suit and talking to someone who wasn't visible.
Two arms - in red sleeves - reached out and pushed Macron away, with one hand covering his mouth and part of his nose while the other was on his jaw. The French leader recoiled, turning his head away. Then, apparently realising that he was on camera, he broke into a smile and gave a little wave.
In subsequent images, Macron and his wife, wearing a red jacket, appeared at the top of the stairs. He offered an arm but she didn't take it. They walked down the carpeted stairs side by side.
The French leader argued that the images and reaction to them offered a cautionary tale about disinformation in the social media age.
He said that in recent weeks, other videos had been used to circulate made-up stories that he'd taken cocaine with the leaders of Britain and Germany - when, in fact, he said he'd just been picking up a tissue - and that he'd had a muscular encounter with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, when they'd been shaking and holding hands.
"Everyone needs to calm down," he said.
His office also downplayed the interaction.
"It was a moment where the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around. It's a moment of complicity. It was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists," his office said.
Brigitte Macron was Brigitte Auzière, a married mother of three children, when they met at his high school. A teacher, she supervised the drama club where Emmanuel Macron, a literature lover, was a member.
He moved to Paris for his last year of high school, but promised to marry Brigitte. She later moved to the French capital to join him and divorced before they finally married.
Australian Associated Press
