La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (31 page)

Carla Bruni was traveling to Burkina Faso, her first official solo trip as first lady and as the first ambassador for the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. She had invited me and Anne-Florence Schmitt, the editor of the magazine
Madame Figaro
, on the overnight trip—a personal experiment in burnishing her image and projecting the soft power of France.

During the flight, she did not spend her time memorizing her talking points and statistics on AIDS in Africa; she was savoring
Le Horla
, Guy de Maupassant’s short novel about anguish and insanity, pinching the edge of each page as she turned it, in slow motion. When one of the pilots brought her a heated hand towel on a silver tray, she unfolded it and pressed it between her two hands as if in prayer, closing her eyes and rubbing her open palms up and down slowly along the piece of warm fabric.

This was an encounter with a modern-day woman with the manners of an eighteenth-century courtesan, skilled in the art of movement and the rituals of conversation. If Sarkozy is an exemplar of anti-seduction, Carla has the gifts to be his counterpoint and balance—a woman whose own mastery at attracting and charming others can translate into a clear political asset.

From afar, Carla is beautiful: about five feet ten, with a lean, long-limbed model’s body and a high-cheekboned face that kisses the camera. But close up, she is not a fairy-tale bonbon of perfection. On this trip, her hair hung straight and thin. The tiniest of jowls were forming on both sides of her jaw. Her eyelids were slightly hooded. She confessed that her face had been lasered. She had her nose redone twice, the first time decades ago after it was broken, according to one of her intimates. It was the blend of vulnerability and ease that pulled me in.

As we talked, I came to realize where her true power lies and why so many men—from Eric Clapton to Mick Jagger—have been entranced. It is her voice. She has a dangerous voice, the voice of the Siren, the most ancient seductress of all. Lyrical, low, liquid, foreign, it does not rush but flows and relaxes and caresses. Carla was born Italian but has lived in France most of her life. Her perfect French and near-perfect, lightly slanged English have a touch of Italian.

In the two days I spent with her, her voice never became high-pitched or aggressive, even when I asked pointed questions about her personal life. Her speech pattern stayed slow, as if she had just stepped out of bed and had all the time in the world. At one point, we plunged into a discussion about the nuisance of phone taps by intelligence agencies and whether they inhibited phone sex with a spouse. But she never offered a definition of phone sex, and I realized afterward that I might have misunderstood. Phone sex for an American is simulating the sex act on the phone; for Carla, it might just be talking for a while in her normal voice.

At first blush, Carla Bruni seemed to lack the right profile to be the first lady of France. An heiress to an Italian tire-manufacturing fortune, she moved with her family to France as a child, studied art in Paris, became a fashion model, then turned to singing. Her politics were to the left, Sarkozy’s to the right. She was savaged by some in the media as a sex-crazed foreigner—nude photos of her taken years ago were circulated on the Internet, and she herself had fueled the stories of her racy past. She had described herself as a “tamer of men,” had called monogamy “terribly boring,” and had declared herself faithful—to herself. Bruni was apparently the inspiration for a despicable character in
Rien de Grave
(
Nothing Serious
), a roman à clef by Justine Lévy, the daughter of the philosopher-writer Bernard-Henri Lévy and the former wife of the philosopher and radio show host Raphaël Enthoven, who left her and took up with Bruni shortly afterward. He was twenty-four; Bruni was thirty-two.

In the novel, Justine Lévy describes a Bruni-like character who has had plastic surgery and is “a leech of a woman,” with “a Terminator smile” and the “look of a killer.” The Enthoven-like character is bewitched by this woman as soon as they meet. Enthoven and Bruni insist that they began seeing each other three months after he had left Lévy; what was more unsettling was that Enthoven’s father, Jean-Paul, one of France’s leading literary editors, had been courting Bruni at the time. Carla Bruni and Raphaël Enthoven never married, but they had a son. In the spring of 2007, after they had been together for nearly seven years, Raphaël Enthoven decided to end the relationship.

The lives of Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni changed the night they met. They were brought together in November 2007 at a small dinner party hosted by Jacques Séguéla, the French advertising mogul and a friend of both of them. Séguéla included luscious details of the love-at-first-sight encounter in a memoir published in 2009. In the book, Sarkozy tells Bruni how delighted he is to meet a beautiful woman who smokes and drinks. He dismisses her past, saying, “My reputation is no worse than yours.” He predicts that they will announce their wedding engagement and will be a better fit than Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy.

“Engagement, never!” she replies. “From now on I will only live with a man who gives me a child.” He takes her home. When she invites him in for coffee, he demurs. “Never on a first date,” he says.

When I read passages from this book to Bruni as we flew back to Paris from Ouagadougou, an amused look came over her face. I could see that she was struggling: Should she deny everything? Say it was an exaggeration?

“I haven’t read much of it, what Jacques said, but he was there,” Carla said.

Séguéla quotes Carla as telling Sarkozy that he is “an amateur” in dealing with the celebrity press. “My relationship with Mick Jagger lasted eight years in secrecy—I disguised myself,” she says in Séguéla’s telling.

When I asked her about these lines, she denied ever talking about Jagger. “I never talk about Mick! I kept my habit. I’m just always surprised hearing quotes from myself that I never said.”

Months later, I broached the story of The Dinner That Changed French History over coffee with Séguéla. He said he had reconstructed the dinner conversation from memory a few days later with the help of his wife, then gave it to Sarkozy and Bruni for a final vetting. He said they did not request changes. “Carla and Nicolas told me, ‘We want this to be written as it happened, and you wrote it, unadorned, just as it happened,’” he said.

As he talked about how the evening unfolded, Séguéla described a Carla the world already knew, but also a private side of Sarkozy that few have seen. “It was an unexpected game of seduction between two wild animals,” he said. “The two are
grands séducteurs
.” He explained that he launched the conversation in telling them both to amuse themselves by playing their “seduction number.” So everyone started playacting, as if it were a salon game with the task: “You have three minutes to seduce me.”

“Like speed dating?” I asked.

“It was less formal than that,” he said. “And then all of a sudden, in fifteen, twenty minutes, fiction became reality. The game became real life. In France, we have an expression that says, ‘
Ils se sont pris au jeu
’—They’ve been caught up in the game.”

“So everything in the book is true, even what Sarkozy said about Mick Jagger’s ‘ridiculous calves’?”

“Absolutely,” said Séguéla. “And besides, Jagger phoned Carla, saying to her gently, ‘But listen, you could at least have defended my calves!’”

At first, the “Carla effect” worked against the president. While the French faced the New Year in 2008 with higher prices and a decline in their buying power, Sarkozy was touring the pyramids of Egypt in a whirlwind, paparazzi-documented romance with Bruni. An editorial in
L’Est Républicain
, whose readers live far from sophisticated Paris, opined: “He forgot that he should have a romance with France and not with himself and his paramour.”

The French criticized the
People
-magazine style of their marriage, just eleven and a half weeks after their first meeting, and three and a half months after Sarkozy’s divorce from Cécilia. At a formal dinner for the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, at the Élysée, Simone Veil, a French former cabinet minister and survivor of Auschwitz, declined to shake Carla’s hand.

But Carla learned how to play the role of first lady even while keeping her career as a singer. She transformed the position from long-suffering pillar of support to bread-winning symbol of independence. She opened the private quarters of the Élysée to photographers from magazines like
Paris Match
and
Vanity Fair
. She turned demure, donning a gray midcalf Dior coatdress and matching pillbox hat and doing a perfect curtsy for the Queen of England. She wore flat ballerina slippers and kitten heels so as not to be too much taller than her short spouse. As an experienced ex-model, she assumed a goody-goody persona, looking down modestly, not up haughtily, at the camera lenses of the photographers who followed her.

Her approval ratings soared to more than double her husband’s.

A passionate believer in psychoanalysis (she has been in psychoanalysis for well over a decade and once told an interviewer her dream was to train to become a psychoanalyst), Carla also made it her mission to change Nicolas. She told me she put him on a diet; he lost weight. She helped cure his migraines by persuading him to stop eating refined sugar and to break his chocolate addiction. She helped relieve his backaches by getting him to use her personal trainer. She tried—with mixed results—to curb his fits of anger. Soon his aides began asking before a trip whether she would be coming along. For the first two years of his presidency, Sarkozy had been ostentatious in his rejection of the arts. Then he began to be photographed with Marcel Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
under his arm. On his Facebook page he bragged that he was reading
Pierre et Jean
by Guy de Maupassant and
Le lièvre de Patagonie
by Claude Lanzmann.

“You’re reading?” one of Sarkozy’s friends asked him in disbelief.

Sarkozy replied, “You tried for twenty years. It took Carla twenty days.”

At times, Bruni seemed to be in charge, with Sarkozy following her lead. She was as soft as a kitten but tough like a man. She had the handshake grip of a wrestler and the cunning of a predator. She flirted with both women and men. Her manner wasn’t necessarily sexual, but it enchanted the object of her desire.

She didn’t seem to care what others thought of her. She reportedly told Michelle Obama that she and Sarkozy had been late to meet a foreign head of state because they were having sex, a story recounted by journalist Jonathan Alter in his book
The Promise
. “Bruni wanted to know if, like the Sarkozys, Michelle and the president had ever kept anyone waiting that way,” Alter wrote. “Michelle laughed nervously and said no.”

Her respect for her role as first lady did not stop her from writing lines in her new songs about orgasms and, most notoriously, about smoking her lover like a joint. In recordings, she included lyrics like: “I am a child / despite my forty years / despite my thirty lovers, a child.” (She said that she never actually counted her lovers and chose the number thirty for its lyrical value.)

On our trip to Africa, Carla embraced small talk, telling me that Sean Connery was the best James Bond and that women should stop wearing makeup when they reach the age of twenty-five. She also turned confessional: she longed to have a child with Sarkozy but might be too old for it to happen; she hated politics and dinner parties. An American first lady would have stayed on topic, no matter what.

I asked Bruni if she was a predator, as others have called her. She formed her hands into claws. “Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” she growled, rolling her Rs, Italian-style. “No, I don’t feel like a lion or a tiger,” she said. “I was never as wild!” She laughed.

I asked what comments by the news media were most painful. “The only stories I found unbearable were that Nicolas and I got married because of ambition, ambition for me, to have such a grand position, ambition for him, to get a woman from another world,” she said. “I don’t see who these people think they are.”

One day, while Bruni was doing an interview with the women’s magazine
Femme Actuelle
in the private quarters of the Élysée Palace, Sarkozy dropped in unannounced.

“Voilà, as soon as there are women around, voilà, as soon as there are ladies…,” she said when he arrived.

They kissed. Sarkozy perched himself on the arm of a chair, next to Bruni. She lightly rubbed his thigh.

“Oh là là. She’s in great shape, huh, the first lady?” Sarkozy said. He added that he had had a meeting earlier that day with the prime minister of Iraq.

“Cool!” Bruni responded.

Then Sarkozy announced that he had been exercising and had just got out of the shower. He put his hand on Bruni’s shoulder and rubbed it. After a bit more chitchat, he stood up to leave.

“
Bon courage, Chouchou!
” Bruni called out as he departed.
Chouchou
more or less means “sweetheart.”

The video clip of Sarkozy’s “surprise” visit—whether it was staged or not was an open question—became a worldwide hit on the Internet.
Femme Actuelle
posted a video of interview excerpts on its website. Sarkozy apparently liked the video so much that it became one of the first links on his Facebook page.

Other elements of the page suggested, however, that some of Bruni’s lessons about refined appearances and subtle self-presentation might not have taken. Sarkozy’s Facebook photo showed him tanned and grinning broadly, the top three buttons of his white shirt undone.

Under occupation, he had written, “Head of State.”