A Swiss Politician - The Most Dangerous Night
This article is part of a series. To read the first part, click on the following link: Who am I really?
I’ll clarify from the outset what I will not say. I will not name a canton, a party, a specific position, or any detail that could identify anyone. That isn’t cowardice - it’s a commitment I made that night, and I have no reason to break it now. What I’m going to recount is the experience. Not the identity.
What I can say without risk: he was known. A familiar face in French-speaking Swiss media, someone whose name circulates in political conversations without being on the national front line. The kind of person you recognize in a restaurant but wouldn’t necessarily be able to explain exactly what he does unless you paid attention. In Switzerland, that level of notoriety is enough to make everything complicated.
How It Was Arranged
He didn’t contact me directly. That wouldn’t have made sense - too many traces, too many risks. It went through someone I knew well, a Geneva-based businessman with whom I had an established relationship of trust, someone who discreetly acts as an interface for people who need things handled without leaving visible fingerprints.
The message was simple: someone wished to meet me, outside Geneva, in a hotel he had chosen, for an evening. Availability, fee, conditions - everything discussed through the intermediary, never directly. I wasn’t told his name right away. I was given his general profile, and within seconds I understood roughly who it was. Not the name, but the category. And the category was enough to understand why everything was so structured.
I took forty-eight hours before answering. Not hesitation in principle - but a serious assessment of the implications. This type of appointment was outside my usual perimeter, not for moral reasons but for practical ones. If something went wrong - if the evening ended in a way he hadn’t wished, if someone talked, if a journalist did his job - the consequences wouldn’t have been symmetrical for him and for me. He had much more to lose. But I had things to lose as well, differently.
I said yes. With conditions that my intermediary conveyed and that were accepted without discussion.
Lausanne - The Train, the Hotel, the Waiting
The hotel was in Lausanne. Not a palace - too visible, too many staff who notice people. A good establishment, discreet, the kind of place where traveling businessmen blend into the décor without effort. The room reserved under a name I didn’t recognize, prepaid, no exchange of credit card at my arrival.
I took the train from Geneva-Cornavin. Forty minutes. I watched the lake slide past the window, thinking about what I would find on the other side, and realized that for the first time in a long while, I truly didn’t know. With my regular clients, even the new ones, I usually have a fairly precise image of what awaits me. Here, I only had a face I had seen on television and a silhouette in a public setting - none of the usual indicators of how someone is in private.
I had chosen the most understated dress I owned - navy blue, knee-length, nothing that would draw attention in a hotel corridor. Lingerie from the first drawer, black lace, my usual instinct when facing an unknown. No visible jewelry. As little surface as possible.
As I knocked on the door, I had a brief and slightly absurd thought: if someone asked me what I was doing there, I would have no suitable answer.
The Man Behind the Door
What struck me first was how different he was from his public image.
On screen - and I had seen him several times in interviews, in debates - he projected something firm, composed, that quiet authority cultivated by people accustomed to public spaces. In that Lausanne hotel room, he looked like an exhausted man trying to remember how to exist without being watched.
Late fifties. Taller than television suggested. Eyes that looked at me with immediate, assessing attention, then softened within seconds - as if my tangible presence dissolved a tension he had been carrying since the moment he arranged this evening.
He shook my hand. That gesture amused me internally - that reflex politeness of the public figure surviving even in the most improbable situations. Then he seemed to realize it himself and smiled slightly. "Sorry. Professional habit."
That self-deprecation immediately put me at ease. People capable of laughing at themselves effortlessly are usually people with whom one can be honest.
The Particular Tension of Secrecy
What made that evening different from the others was in the air - literally. A particular density I had never felt to that degree. Secrecy wasn’t just a practical rule; it was a physical presence in the room. We both felt it, and the fact that we both felt it created something strange - an immediate complicity founded on nothing more than the fact that we were there together and that no one was supposed to know.
He had no phone visible. I hadn’t taken mine out. We ordered drinks - whisky for him, white wine for me - and spoke with particular caution in the first minutes, like two people testing the ground before deciding how far they could go.
And then something loosened. I couldn’t say exactly when. Maybe when he made a slightly cynical remark about Swiss political life and I laughed genuinely, not out of politeness. That laugh changed something in the atmosphere of the room. He understood that I wasn’t there to be impressed by who he was. And that understanding visibly relieved him of a weight.
What He Asked For - and What He Revealed
What he wanted that evening had nothing extraordinary about it in the sense of the requests I sometimes receive. No elaborate scenario, no fantasy constructed over years. Something simpler and, in a way, more eloquent: to be with someone who didn’t know exactly who he was and didn’t care.
He told me that quite directly, after the second drink. That the people around him - in his professional life, in his personal life - always looked at him through what he represented. That even those closest to him had a preconceived idea of him that preceded every conversation. And that sometimes, he needed to exist in a room without that image being there too.
That confidence touched me. Not because it was exceptional - I’ve heard variations of it from many men in many hotel rooms. But because coming from someone whose public image was precisely his primary professional asset, the weight of it was particularly tangible.
What he revealed later in the evening - not in words, but in the way he existed once the distance fell away - was someone gentler than his image. Less assured, less monolithic. Someone who had doubts about things his public role did not allow him to doubt. Someone tired in a way I recognized - that particular fatigue of people who have carried responsibility for too long without space to set it down.
I did not play the therapist. That is not my role, and I refuse to take it on. But I listened to what deserved to be heard, and I made that evening a place where he could exist differently. That was what he had come for, and that was what I gave him.
In the Room - The Contrast
What I will physically remember from that night is the contrast between the public man and the private man - a contrast I had never seen so clearly.
The man I had seen on screen was measured, controlled, each word weighed before being spoken. The man in that Lausanne room had let all of that go in a way I hadn’t anticipated. No brutality, no excess - but a physical presence more direct, more real, less filtered than anything his public image suggested. As if the character had been suspended behind the door and someone else had taken his place for a few hours.
That duality - between image and man, between façade and what lies behind - I see it often in this profession. But rarely with such sharpness. Because his public image was particularly constructed, particularly smooth, the difference with the real man was particularly striking.
I won’t say more about what happened that night. Some nights belong to the people who lived them.
The Return - and the Days After
I took the last train back to Geneva. No extended dinner, no staying overnight - that had been clear from the start, for obvious reasons. On the train running along the dark lake, I felt in a particular state I had never quite experienced before. Not excitement, not ordinary satisfaction. Something more muted - the awareness of having been in a very closed space with someone who invited no one there, and of having been, for a few hours, the only person who knew what that man was really like.
That feeling was both dizzying and heavy.
Ten days later, I saw him on television. A political debate, the kind of prime-time show where people speak loudly and no one truly changes their mind. He was in full form - the impeccable character, the composed voice, the well-constructed arguments. Anyone who hadn’t seen him in that Lausanne room would have seen nothing but the image.
I saw something else. Not voyeuristically - I had no desire to tell anyone what I knew. Just that quiet awareness of having had access to something the journalists on that set would never have, that his colleagues didn’t know, that probably few people in his life truly knew.
I turned off the television after a few minutes. Not because it was uncomfortable. Because that image - the public one - no longer had anything to teach me about him.
What I Took From It
That night taught me something I knew theoretically but had never measured at that scale: public power is a particular kind of solitude. Not ordinary solitude - the solitude of someone constantly surrounded, constantly watched, who can never truly be seen.
I wouldn’t do this type of appointment often. Not because of the risk - the risk was manageable and proved so. But because of the weight. That responsibility of holding something no one else holds - it wears on you differently from other evenings. It demands a form of attention and discretion that goes beyond ordinary professionalism.
But I’m glad it happened. Because that night confirmed something important about what I do: in the right cases, this profession offers people a space that nothing else in their lives offers them. A space to exist without their own image.
For some, it’s one luxury among others. For a few, it’s a necessity.
He, I believe, was in the second category.
Sofia
Sofia, 27 — Based in Geneva, she fully embraces her life as a luxury escort and speaks about it openly.
Through her stories, she shares her beginnings, her experiences with an international clientele, the advantages of the job (luxury, freedom), but also the more complex realities. She writes in a simple, honest way about what truly happens behind the doors of Swiss hotels.
This text was originally written in French. It was then translated to be readable in your language.
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