After finishing secondary school in 1990, she worked as an au pair in Germany while studying at the Free University of Berlin. She met her French husband Christian Jacques there, and they lived together for a year (1997–1998) in Strasbourg, where she studied. She used the surname Jacques-Pajerová for a time, but later adopted his family name Jacques without the suffix -ová, which is customary in the Czech language for female surnames, when this was allowed by a change in the Czech registry law. They have two children, Nina (born 1994) and Sebastian Maxmilian (born 1995).