Carla Bruni, the Italian ex-supermodel turned folk-singer, is madly, passionately, giddily in love with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "She blushes when he comes into the room," says a friend. When she's not with him and the camera crews she is admiring him from afar. "She's very happy," says Colombe Pringle, who has known Bruni since editing French Vogue in the 1990s. "When Sarkozy announced the prospect of marriage during his new year's press conference, I called her to congratulate her while he was still speaking. She said: 'I'm sitting here watching the president on TV. He's amazing.'"
Sarkozy, France's hyperactive, workaholic, political-showman leader, revels in his nickname "Speedy." So it is not surprising that he does not subscribe to slow romance. In October, he reluctantly divorced Cecilia, the bolshy, cheating, rebellious love of his life. In November, he was still devastated, pining and insisting on wearing his wedding ring. Last month, he fell madly in love with Bruni, a younger spitting image of Cecilia, a week after meeting her. At Christmas, they exchanged US$124,000 worth of jewelry and watches as love tokens. By the end of this month, two months after they first set eyes on each other, Bruni is expected to have become his third wife. The left-wing, libertine ex-model, who believes in free love and whose exes include Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Donald Trump, will be the new first lady of France.
The Sarkozy-Bruni public showbiz-romance has already been slammed as vulgar, undignified and unFrench. A quick marriage is seen as the only solution to France's collective embarrassment. But who is Bruni and what awaits her as premiere dame? When Sarkozy's wife Cecilia demanded a divorce and walked out last year, it was a sea-change: From now on, a premiere dame could be modern, no longer a submissive wife. Yet in reality, the job is still steeped in tradition and public opinion can easily turn. All French first ladies are at some point scathingly compared to that unfortunate, loathed fashion victim, Marie Antoinette. With Bruni and Sarkozy's expensive tastes, and Bruni's foreign roots, this comparison is potentially more damaging than ever before. Sarkozy has been likened to a hedonistic monarch who offers up his romantic escapades as entertainment to distract the people from their miserable salaries and economic gloom. Bruni likes to throw parties with him in his lavish retreat in the grounds of the palace of Versailles. As the marriage preparations continue, she should be wary of a revolution.
Carla Bruni-Tedeschi, 39, is a millionaire Italian heiress whose high bourgeois upbringing was far more glamorous and moneyed than Sarkozy's. She grew up believing she was the daughter of the Italian tire magnate and classical composer Alberto Bruni-Tedeschi and the Italian concert pianist Marysa Borini. Years later, her parents told her she was really the fruit of her mother's affair with a violinist 13 years younger, but that, knowing this, Bruni-Tedeschi had raised her as his own. When she was five, the family fled from Turin to France to escape a wave of kidnappings and killings of right-wing politicians and businessmen by Italy's left-wing Red Brigades. As a child, she and her two older siblings were used to bodyguards, palaces and famous friends. The Bruni-Tedeschis lived between Paris and their southern estate on the Cote d'Azur, near the presidential retreat, the fort of Bregancon. Bruni's mother, always keen for her children to make connections, wanted them to befriend the Grimaldi children, Albert, Caroline and Stephanie of Monaco. When Bruni was a teenager, the family traveled back and forth to their Piedmontese castle near Turin, where they showed off their art collection.
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