If nothing else, French President Emmanuel Macron showed that he can take a punch.

And his wife Brigitte showed that she can deliver one, too.

Well, it was not exactly a punch when the French first lady shove/slapped Macron in the face upon disembarking from their plane in Hanoi the other day.

It was more of a stiff arm to the face worthy of an NFL running back. Only Macron did not go down but did his best to play the incident down.

Since the 72-year-old Brigitte was not carrying a football, and Macron was not wearing a helmet with a face guard, Brigitte was able to use both hands to the face of her 46-year-old husband. No penalty was called.

Talk about in-your-face, though.

Macron had to feel like he was back at La Providence, a Catholic high school in France, when, as a 15-year-old pupil, he fell for Brigitte, who then was a 39-year-old married drama teacher with three children.

No doubt she at first brushed Macron off, with a punch line rather than punch, given their age difference.

Yet they began an affair when Macron was 16 and Brigitte was old enough to be his mother.

All the while, Brigitte’s parents thought the teenager Macron was dating Brigitte’s daughter and not the mother.

A real French deadbeat, which Macron is not, would have been dating both.

After a divorce, the pair got married in 2007 when Macron was 29 and Brigitte was 54. They have been together ever since. But the slap showed that the pupil should never make his teacher angry.

The video of the incident, which went around the world, shows Macron standing in front of the plane’s exit door after it landed in Hanoi, the start of a week-long tour of the region. Macron appears to be talking to someone on his right.

Suddenly, Brigitte’s arms appear, slapping and pushing into Macron’s face, causing him to step back.

Being the veteran politician that he is, Macron quickly turns, smiles and waves to onlookers as though nothing out of the ordinary had just happened when, in fact, the first lady of France has just smashed the French president in the mouth.

In something of a role reversal, Emmanuel Macron ended up covering up for Brigitte Macron the way Jill Biden covered up for Joe Biden.

In other words, what you saw, like Joe Biden stumbling around or Brigitte lashing out, is not really what you saw.

What you saw, Macron later said, was the pair joking around or play-fighting, although neither looked happy descending the plane. Brigitte did not hold Macron’s hand.

It would have been helpful if Macron let everyone in on the joke.

Macron said the incident was misinterpreted and overblown into “a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”

“We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” Macron said. “Everyone needs to calm down.”

Macron’s office also downplayed the incident.

It said, “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.”

Ah, the conspiracy theorists. What would we do without them?

As divorce rumors swirl around former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, the thought came to me what would happen if Michelle threw a punch at Barack.

Unlike Brigitte, who did not knock Macron down, Michelle would have decked Barack.

Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas can be reached at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com