THE OBSERVER: The latest sensation in France's love-hate relationship with its first lady has been whether Carla Bruni is pregnant. And her appearance this week at Cannes in Woody Allen's latest film only adds to the fun. Here, five people in the know reveal what she really means to the republicThe long-suffering French public sometimes feels it knows a little too much about its first lady. In three years of Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni's whirlwind romance and marriage, we've been treated to their first dates, joint jogging sessions, pet names, expensive love tokens and taste for kissing in public – unprecedented at the Elysée Palace. We know Bruni hired a personal trainer who tones up the muscles of the couple's private parts, that beer makes her bloated and can lead to mistaken speculation that she's pregnant, that she's addicted to cigarettes and likes to watch DVDs with her husband after work (Stanley Kubrick or Pasolini). We were even treated to Madame Bruni-Sarkozy's old tissues and loose change when she once publicly tipped out the contents of her handbag for the nation (hairbrush, reading glasses, teddy and a notebook for jotting down song lyrics. "I've got writing like a psychopath," she helpfully explained).
We've listened to Bruni's album of love songs to her husband ("I want your laugh in my mouth" was one line) and now we'll inevitably troop to the cinema to watch her cameo in the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris, shot as the proud president stood watching on set. In France, Allen is a god who can do no wrong. Perhaps Bruni's cameo is a way to redeem herself to a nation so embarrassed by her husband. Bruni's stint as première dame de France was never going to be easy. It wasn't the fact that she was a multimillionaire Italian former supermodel turned folk-pop singer who once dated Mick Jagger. It was more that the circumstances of her marriage to Sarkozy were stacked against her from the start. In autumn 2007, the newly elected Sarkozy went to pieces when his adored wife Cécilia finally divorced him. A teetotaller normally in bed by midnight, he begged friends to organise dinner parties to distract him. At one dinner he met Bruni, who looks uncannily like a younger version of his ex-wife. Less than three months later they married at the Elysée. It was his third marriage and her first. Spending the wedding night at their retreat in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles did little to stop the inevitable comparisons with Marie Antoinette, another fashion-obsessed foreigner married to an unpopular head of state. » | Angelique Chrisafis | Sunday, May 08, 2011
