Ewwww La La

...Mitterrand spent most New Year’s Eves at the Old Cataract in Aswan, another fi ne Egyptian hotel, with his mistress Anne Pingeot, their daughter Mazarine, and a contingent of French gendarmes...

...By contrast, former president Jacques Chirac may yet be taken to task by the French justice system (although no one is really holding his breath) over two million francs’ worth of plane tickets paid for in mysteriously acquired cash over the years...

...No one mistook their fi nal split as having been caused by both parties’ extramarital affairs during their 11-year marriage (and nearly 20 years together...

...It is showing vulnerability that is the cardinal mistake...

...She’s for me...

...Still married at the time to his fi rst wife, Sarkozy pursued C?cilia relentlessly for four years...

...He shook hands twice with George W. Bush, for Pierre’s sake...

...Needless to say, nobody was married to anybody...

...At fi rst, Bruni declined...

...It would take him eight years to secure a divorce from his devout Catholic, Corsican-born first wife, Marie...

...and his stays at world-class locations like the H?tel du Cap at Antibes, La Gazelle d’Or in Taroudant in southern Morocco, and the Cipriani in Venice...

...It made for amusing dinner party talk in Paris, which he didn’t object to—after all, a president with many conquests was a powerful president...

...The press and the insidethep?riph?rique crowd knew all about Val?ry Giscard d’Estaing’s photographer girlfriend and Ferrari crashes with milk trucks in the wee hours, about Mitterrand’s second household and “hidden” daughter, about Chirac’s fl ings with a FrenchItalian fi lm star and a Japanese gallery owner...

...vae victis obtains in professional as well as in personal life...

...He sent additional French troops to Afghanistan...

...Hiding affairs, lying about infi delities, is par for the course in French political life: It’s expected...

...This is a considerable innovation in French privacy law, fi guring nowhere in the Legal Code...

...Sarko greeted Mme S?gu?la and said: ‘I must apologize to you, there’s something I need to talk about with Miss Bruni.’ He then turned his back on his hostess and never stopped talking with Carla—he looked at no one else...

...All this, his poll numbers withstood— until Sarkozy fell in love...

...He hadn’t supported her suffi ciently, she said...

...Not to mention that just about every editor and producer had a similarly complex private life...

...The entire Left Bank had followed the drama with delicious glee, especially since Justine L?vy wrote a bitter roman ? clef about the whole betrayal...

...They had this four-hour intense, private conversation, which everyone was staring at...

...One guest at the dinner recalls that Sarkozy was seated between Mme S?gu?la, on the president’s right as is proper, and Bruni...

...I love kids, I’m a very good father...

...Yes, even before his carefully leaked affair with a Le Figaro political journalist, Sarko was well known for offi ce fl ings, usually with comely staffers (one of whom, some 15 years back, was Jacques Chirac’s daughter Claude...

...It was never held against him...

...When she fi nally agreed to come, she fl atly refused to bring her guitar, though S?gu?la pleaded, knowing Sarkozy’s taste for after-dinner singing with friends...

...The left-wing daily Lib?ration—which early on ran the headline “Pr?sident bling-bling” with a full-page cover picture of Sarko in Ray-Ban sunglasses, a cell phone glued to his ear, looking like a Prada-clothed Beverly Hills security guard—jumped on every Sarko-Bruni sighting with a frisson...

...Of course Bill Clinton lied about his sex life, the French will tell you...

...Most couples are expected to weather a signifi cant amount of straying...

...Sarkozy later recalled thinking: “What am I doing marrying her off to someone else...

...During the presidential campaign she criticized Sarkozy’s policies and sang at a rally for his Socialist opponent, S?gol?ne Royal...

...A compulsive womanizer, Mitterrand fully expected (and was never disappointed) that no one would report the moves he made on any pretty woman on press trips and offi cial visits during his 14 years in offi ce...

...For one thing, Bruni was on the other side politically...

...In a country where politicians’ peccadilloes usually elicit at worst gossipy curiosity and at best smug self-congratulation for the supposed “sophistication” of the French (understand: so unlike les anglo-saxons, those simple souls who see sex scandals where we accept the rich tapestry of life), Nicolas Sarkozy could have been forgiven for assuming he could control the spin on his high-octane romance with Italian top model and singer Carla Bruni, just as he had successfully parlayed his controversial style into a decisive presidential win eight months ago...

...He was 28, C?cilia was 26, and her groom—Jacques Martin, France’s answer to Johnny Carson—was 51...

...Oh, and he was having an affair...

...And that, he is discovering, is more politically perilous than almost anything else he has done...

...No one has yet bothered to investigate Chirac’s use of a Quai Voltaire luxury apartment facing the Louvre loaned by the family of the late Lebanese premier Rafi k Hariri...

...It simply isn’t done...

...That was only the beginning...

...And he charmed her...

...He did so partly by ordering the telephones of numerous journalists, including a le Monde editor, tapped so as to stay abreast of possible rumors (and intimate a few home truths to anyone who might contemplate an expos...

...permissive and populist sixties roots...

...Bruni moved into the private apartments at the Elys?e in a matter of weeks, and soon was organizing the presidential Christmas party, traditionally a prerogative of the president’s wife...

...I’m rattling about the Elys?e all alone at night,” S?gu?la said Sarkozy told him...

...He advocated better pay for a longer work week, and in November he defeated the civil service transport unions in a make-or-break negotiation over pensions...

...But none of this is the stuff French divorces are made of...

...Sarko fi nally met Bruni last fall when she came to the Elys?e as part of a delegation of artists supporting a White Paper on fighting Internet piracy...

...Enthoven had left his wife, Justine, the daughter of celebrity thinker Bernard-Henri L?vy, after falling for Carla, who was at the time the girlfriend of his own father, Jean-Paul Enthoven...

...In this guest’s mind, Sarko’s recklessness lay less in Bruni’s political opinions (after all, Sarkozy had stuffed his government with left-wing ministers from the routed Socialist camp) than in her past love life (Mick Jagger, Donald Trump, Kevin Costner, Eric Clapton, and so on) and in her famous statement about “not understanding the concept of monogamy...

...Yes, she left him three years ago to spend a couple of months in New York with the high-profi le event organizer of the World Economic Forum...

...It was sometimes diffi cult to tell what the critics—and everyone jumped on the bandwagon: op-ed pages, bloggers, Internet forums—objected to most: the ostentatious spending (in a country where Socialist party leader Fran?ois Hollande applies the insult “rich” to anyone earning more than $70,000 a year) or just the fact that no one took the trouble to conceal it...

...Apparently impressed, Sarkozy asked a mutual friend, the grand old spin doctor from the Mitterrand years Jacques S?gu?la, to include Bruni in a dinner party at S?gu?la’s home being thrown to lift the lonely president’s spirits...

...It turns out that an open romance—as opposed to quiet cheating on your long-suffering wife (or possibly not so long-suffering...

...Piqued, Sarkozy reminded his critics at the Elys?e New Year’s press conference that his predecessors were no strangers to luxury holidays, sometimes in the very places he had visited, and at the Republic’s expense, whereas he had paid his and Miss Bruni’s way...

...in particular, a romance exposing M. le pr?sident as the kind of klutz who lays his heart (in Dior diamonds and pink spinels) at the feet of a famous beauty within two months of a very public divorce—is unpardonable...

...One fl abbergasted witness says he saw the president throw a friendly arm around a rather shell-shocked Enthoven’s shoulders, telling him as if they’d known each other from childhood, “Don’t worry about Aur?lien, old bean, I’ll take good care of him...

...There is no French equivalent for the so useful “Duh...

...He spoke plainly where his predecessors equivocated...

...but in the meantime, including his stint as budget secretary under Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, he lived, sometimes in offi cial residences, with C?cilia, who called herself Madame Sarkozy...

...For years, the French protested that they were not interested in public personalities’ private lives...

...Sarkozy at fi rst seemed to be from this familiar mold...

...Precedent isn’t supposed to matter as much in French law as it does in the United States, but these rulings will...

...At this affair, her son’s father, the philosophy professor Rapha?l Enthoven, from whom she separated a couple of years ago, mingled with Bruni’s pianist mother and fi lm director sister and all three of Sarkozy’s sons...

...This is perhaps the real reason why the French, whose society is structurally averse to risk, object to the SarkozyBruni whirlwind romance: Sarko has been taking very public risks from the start of his presidency, and Bruni was the riskiest choice of all...

...but in truth they were mesmerized...

...Before Sarko-Bruni, there was S?gol?ne-Fran?ois, the Socialist power couple whose union did not survive her run for president...

...Nobody was so uncouth as to actually print anything, offi cially because France’s stringent privacy laws prevented it, in reality because it would have been such a pedestrian thing to do...

...Not their plane fare, though: Sarko’s friend, the tycoon Vincent Bollor?, provided a private jet for the trip to Egypt...

...Every pundit and commentator is criticizing “la people-isation de la vie politique,” meaning the invasion of the political sphere by the celebrity culture (celebrities are known as “les people” in France, a term traceable, via a gossip column called “People” in the weekly L’Express, to its original in the Time magazine of the 1960s...

...They dined ? deux in expensive restaurants...

...The two met again the following day and haven’t left each other’s side since...

...his 52 trips to Japan in 10 years...

...That’s the way things used to be done in Paris: intricately incestuous, with elegant literary accounts, spiked with insider knowledge and spiteful indirection, written by and for a self-appointed elite...

...Sarkozy ran as the candidate of change...

...This explains why apologies have no place in our culture: They are seen as a fatal admission of weakness...

...He was in the cage with the tigress...

...The privacy fi nes are low enough that show-business celebrity magazines have hefty budgets set aside to pay them and blithely sell hundreds of thousands of copies a week containing the illegal latest on France’s answer to Lindsay, Paris, or Britney...

...Sarkozy may end up dragging France into the 21st century in more ways than he expected...

...Having protested until her presidential defeat that they were still living in blissful, if unmarried, happiness, S?gol?ne Royal abruptly kicked Fran?ois Hollande, her partner of 23 years, the father of her four children, and the secretary general of her own party, out of their home last summer...

...I’ll invite some left-wing pals, you can have a discussion,” S?gu?la replied...

...They holidayed in Egypt and stayed at the fivestar Old Winter Palace at Luxor...

...The president has been accused of “unseemliness” and “vulgarity” by the lofty souls of the bien-pensant leftwing press, who see no inconsistency with their own well-trumpeted socially Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, a journalist in Paris, is the author of William et Harry, derni?re chance pour la couronne (Editions T?l?maque...

...Hollande subsequently tried to sue a gossip magazine for its reporting of said affair, but his case was thrown out...

...Sarkozy in fact was a complete stranger to the Enthoven circle, itself romantically complex...

...The judge ruled Hollande should not have stage-managed his private life to boost his then-partner’s public image...

...the French are no Neanderthals when it comes to women’s rights, they’ll be glad to tell you...

...They were seen (with Miss Bruni’s mother as well as her 6-year-old son, Aur?lien) at Disneyland Paris, aka the “cultural Chernobyl...

...This was perfunctorily investigated years later, with the entire country yawning at the revelations...

...After all, he had famously fallen in love with his second wife, C?cilia, while offi ciating at her wedding in his capacity as mayor of Neuilly, a well-to-do inner suburb of Paris...

...Like the Romans, the French despise a loser...

...freebie, but it certainly wasn’t a secret...

...You could see she started laughing after a while, but he could as well have been blown off by her in front of everyone else...

...Nobody dared leave, and afterwards they complained that it was like royal protocol, you had to remain until they’d risen from the table...

...You might fault the Bollor...

...But then Mitterrand kept his parallel life private...

...But as the proliferation of celebrity magazines and television programs in the past decade (the one bright spot in an otherwise declining publishing sector) should have made clear, they always were...

...The only time Sarko’s presidential bid seemed in danger of faltering was in 2005, not so much because his wife had left him but because he seemed so affected by it...

...He expected to encounter resistance when he tried to wean the French from their overprotective employment law, their stridently antiAmerican foreign policy, their lavish welfare state, their politically correct pieties on immigration, and their retrograde attitude to global capitalism...

...Where he departed from the usual pattern was in eventually suing for divorce even though he was mayor of a famously conservative town...

...But this in-your-face, very public carrying on...

...Similarly, C?cilia Sarkozy lost last week in court when seeking an injunction to ban an unauthorized biography, with the judge offering the same reason: that she and her then-husband had repeatedly invited the media to report on their family life, so they could not invoke a right to privacy...