At 57, Xavier Niel is the tenth richest man in France. Extremely publicized, the businessman is nonetheless very discreet about his private, even secret life on his most controversial passions …
Xavier Niel is one of the best known business leaders in France. And for good reason, he is, among others, the boss of Free, the famous mobile operator. Today at the head of a fortune estimated by the magazine Forbes At 9.8 billion euros, it is placed in 10th position in the classification of French billionaires. But did you know that he had a passion prohibited by law?
Xavier Niel: his discreet passion … and forbidden!
Even if Forbes ranked 235e World fortune last April, Xavier Niel knew how to keep hobbies much more confidential than those practiced by his colleagues. Golf, horse, sail … Very little for the 57 -year -old entrepreneur who prefers by far to devote himself to one of his old passions: catacombs. The newspaper shareholder The world is what is called a cataphile, name given to those who like to survey the underground spaces, including the 300km of tunnels and other paths which run under Paris.
But don’t ask him to pour out on the subject: the billionaire never talks about it. It must be said that this practice has been prohibited by law since 1955 and that it is strictly forbidden to descend under the level of the Seine … even when it is called Xavier Niel! Official visits are however organized within the capital, but this is only a tiny part of the tunnels that cataphiles like to explore.
Xavier Niel: a secret passage with him? “An apartment connected to …”
This father of four children – Jules and John, born from a first union, and Elisa and Joseph, fruit of her loves with Delphine Arnault, the daughter of Bernard Arnault -, therefore prefers not to pour out on this prohibited passion. However, it is rumored that this hobby would have discovered itself in the 1980s and that it would always be used with the same group of friends. “He is an excellent walker, and never the last to crawl in difficult passages”even told one of them to Capital In 2013. Besides, in 2011, Xavier Niel even bought an old anti -disasteric shelter that his stooges and used to visit.
Information revealed by The world In 2014 is even more surprising: “The rumor lends him the enjoyment of an apartment connected to a private staircase opening on the catacombs”. In reality, the famous cataphile has a building whose ground floor is connected to a basement leading to a vaulted room dug by Parisian quarryers in 1785. Access is very discreet and rare are those who know its exact location. Discretion remains the key word …
