On doit avoir très peur d'écrire. Ça n'est pas un acte naturel comme manger, ou faire l'amour. D'une certaine façon, c'est un acte contre nature. C'est dire à la nature qu'elle ne suffit pas, qu'il faut une autre réalité, l'imagination littéraire. 
Carlos Fuentes, écrivain mexicain décédé hier à l'âge de 83 ans.
On January 8, two days after the couple returned to Paris, Sarkozy called a press conference, and a record 600 reporters showed up. The second question was about the president’s relationship with Carla Bruni, and Sarkozy waded right in: “Carla and I have decided not to lie.… It’s serious.” By February, his approval rating had slid 10 points, in just a month. The leaders of the U.M.P. were looking ahead to municipal elections in March and beginning to worry that his amorous antics could put them in jeopardy. They were right—the U.M.P. did not do well in March, and one month later Le Monde was still annoyed with his unorthodox conduct: “He was given a warning by the polls and the municipal elections: a president doesn’t have the right to happiness, or if he does, it must be with complete discretion.”
Carla defends Sarkozy by saying that he rejected the option of staying married and leading a double life. “He’s from our generation. He doesn’t want to lie. He doesn’t want to have a second family somewhere.” She adds, “He never thought that our going to Egypt would make such a fuss. We took three days, and it lasted weeks and weeks [in the press]. It looks like we spent five weeks lying on the beach, and we spent two hours. And for one hour he talked with Bernard Kouchner, because they were working hard. I said, ‘Nicolas, it’s not fair that people think you don’t work just because you’ve been wearing jeans with me.’ ” Thereupon Carla, no slouch in the image department herself, decreed No More Jeans. She says, “It’s easy to be quieter, because we are both exhausted. Every human being has his way of filling up his life, and he’s a man who fills up his time. Maybe it’s because he is a nervous and anxious man, like sensitive people are. Me, I’m nervous and anxious, but I like to relax.”
Still, the reverberations continue to this day. Sarkozy’s approval ratings are only now beginning to inch upward, and Carla has regrets. “My mistake is that I fell madly in love and did not take the measure of how enormous this was going to be.” She claims, “I would never have gone to Petra—I would have said to Nicolas, ‘You know what? We wait six months and then we go to Petra or go to Disneyland.’ ” She says they both now realize their blunder. But she does not believe in whining: “When you have a relationship with the press, no matter what your job is, there is only one solution. Either do not court the press—and everyone is free to be unknown and have a perfectly fantastic life without being famous—or, if you expose yourself, it means there is something about you that wants to be there. It is not obligatory. I was not obliged to be a model. I was not obliged to be a singer. I could have been a doctor.”
The small wedding party for Carla and Sarkozy at La Lanterne, on February 2, capped an extraordinary period of less than four months, during which the president of France globe-trotted to Saudi Arabia, China, India, and Morocco while his official duties and the government’s programs for reform had to compete for headlines with his divorce from one woman and his meeting, courting, and marrying another. The only time I see Carla’s perfect confidence crack a little is when I ask her about all the comparisons made between her and Cécilia—going to Disneyland, loving Petra, getting the same ring. “It’s very strange—how can I say it?—a mixed situation,” she admits. “I don’t know if you have ever gone to Petra, but everyone who goes there would like it. It is one of the wonders of the world. Cécilia became engaged to Nicolas 20 years ago, and not at all with that ring. It came out that she got that ring from Christian Dior. He probably gave her many rings, but not that one.”
“He didn’t give her the ring?”
“That’s what he says.”
Carla then abruptly asks if I would like another Coca-Cola and leaves the room. When she comes back, she says, “How would I want to have a man who is 52 years old not to have a past? He would be a strange man.” She then declares that she is “O.K. with his past.”
That is fortunate, because in the month preceding their wedding three bombshell books about Cécilia were published—in spite of Cécilia’s efforts to stop the publication of one of them—and in them she accuses Sarkozy of being stingy, of loving no one, not even his children, and of not being able to remember the names of women he has slept with. Worse yet, four days after the wedding the Web site of Le Nouvel Observateur published a story about what it claimed was a text message from Sarkozy to Cécilia, telling her that if she came back to him he would “cancel everything.” Sarkozy not only angrily denied the allegation but also filed a criminal complaint for forgery that could have sent the editor, Airy Routier, to jail. At that point, the French press drew up battle lines, pro and con, regarding the president.
In March, Carla published a sophisticated op-ed piece in Le Monde, entitled “Stop the Slander,” in which she decried the use of rumor disguised as news, and announced that her husband had “just withdrawn his complaint against Le Nouvel Observateur, after receiving a letter of apology that Airy Routier wrote to me.” (Though Routier may have apologized to Carla personally, he did not publicly back down on his assertion.) People speculated that Carla had had help with writing the article, but she insists that she did not, and that neither her husband nor anyone else in the government saw it before she sent it. “It took me so much time to write, compared to a song,” she says.
The French press is still trying to come to terms with “Sarkozysme.” In May, a summit of France’s top journalists was convened, and a major topic discussed was how to cover the president. Sarkozy and his supporters argue that, at a time when there is a weakened Socialist opposition, the press should devote itself to objectively reporting the news and framing the issues instead of attempting to become the opposition. Carla attributes much of the criticism in the press to a natural pessimism in the French people, as opposed to Italians, who are more optimistic. “Cocteau said, ‘French people are Italian people in a bad mood.’ ”
Neither the press’s carping nor the electorate’s dissatisfaction has persuaded Sarkozy to scale back his goals, however. He is pressing ahead with his efforts to loosen the 35-hour-workweek rules, cut jobs in the public sector, pass a big economic modernization bill, and reconfigure the military. On the international front, in July, France under Sarkozy took over the six-month, rotating presidency of the European Union. Sarkozy, who is determined to restore la gloire de la France in the eyes of the world, is using that position to launch a kind of sister organization called the Mediterranean Union—comprising E.U. members and nearly all the other countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea—that would cooperate on regional projects and, perhaps, help lead to peace in the Middle East. But due to lukewarm support from some important countries (Germany, Algeria, Jordan) and barely masked hostility from others (Libya, Turkey), most observers are skeptical about the Union’s success.
Since her marriage, Carla has been casting off her wild, bohemian side. “I think monogamy is not an idea, it’s a fact,” she says today. Moreover, she has proved to be a great asset to her husband, for, like Ronald Reagan, she always knows which are the flattering camera angles. Catherine Nay now refers to her as “the anti-Cécilia. On their trip to South Africa, I saw her smile more in 24 hours than I saw Cécilia smile in 15 years.” Jacques Séguéla says, “She makes the president more desirable, more modern. France needs modernity, talent, cleverness. It’s like Jack and Jackie. Like Rainier and Grace Kelly. A new worldwide couple!”
I ask Carla how she likes being compared to Jackie Kennedy. She answers, “She was so young and modern, and of course unconsciously I would project myself more like Jackie Kennedy than, for instance, Madame de Gaulle, who would be much more like the classical French woman behind her husband. There is a great photograph of Madame de Gaulle serving soup to her husband. I do serve soup to my husband sometimes, but I wouldn’t get photographed that way.”
Not to be outdone, on the Sunday before Carla and Sarkozy’s visit to Queen Elizabeth, Cécilia, wearing a clinging Versace dress, exchanged vows with Attias in the Rainbow Room, at the top of Rockefeller Center, in a big, all-out New York wedding, amid rumors that Sarkozy had warned some of the high-profile guests not to attend. When I ask Carla about Cécilia’s timing, she answers, “To me, it was strange.”
Smooth operator that she is, however, Carla has cultivated a good relationship with the first Mrs. Sarkozy, Marie-Dominique, who clearly has no warm feelings for Cécilia. (In June, Marie-Dominique broke her long silence to give an interview to Caroline Derrien and Candice Nedelec, for their book Sarkozy et les Femmes, in which she is very critical of her successor.) “When I met Nicolas, she sent me a little present,” Carla says, “so I called her and said, ‘Marie, how can you be so nice?’ She said, ‘I like you. And he looks happy, and it’s been 20 years since we separated. I had a hard time with Cécilia.… But I think you can make him happy.’ Now we talk once a week, and I love her two sons. Nicolas never dropped Marie and always had a strong link with her.”
Carla invited Marie-Dominique to the star-studded surprise birthday party she threw for Sarkozy at La Lanterne in January, but she did not attend. And despite all the ongoing hostility, Carla hopes that someday she can also be friends with Cécilia. “I don’t believe in cutting out people from the past. It doesn’t give strength, it just gives loneliness.” In fact, she says, if she had her way, “I would be delighted to meet and have lunch with Cécilia, but I think she is not ready, and Nicolas is not. They are still burned by their love—which proves they had a very strong love.” According to friends, Carla can afford to be magnanimous. “She did not have to put up for 20 previous years with having your husband get there,” says her friend Danièle Thompson. “That’s what Cécilia got. Carla is getting the president—plucking the flower when it is in bloom.”
Carla is fully immersed in learning the job Cécilia said she didn’t want—being First Lady of France. So far, she has made few public appearances on French soil. A notable exception was her attendance at the funeral of designer Yves Saint Laurent, for whom she once modeled. Towering between her husband and Saint Laurent’s former partner, Pierre Bergé, the First Lady, glamorous in black Saint Laurent slacks, stood out among all the other great beauties there, including Catherine Deneuve and Claudia Schiffer.
“I am looking for something useful to do,” she tells me. “I get piles of information about what I could do for culture, for children, education, unhappy situations. But I need to study. I don’t want to make the wrong move, and I don’t want to go up against my husband.” It is not exactly an automatic switch, from the studiously cool world Carla used to inhabit to the fiercely scrutinized, 24-hour news cycle of political life. “Learning the code” is how she describes it. “When you are a songwriter and you say, ‘I like polyandry, ha, ha, ha,’ it is written down and it doesn’t matter. But if you’re a First Lady and you say, ‘I like Coca-Cola Light,’ it’s a drama. I have to pay attention to every detail, and that is very new for me.”
Her fantasy at 40 is to give birth to a baby at the Élysée. “I’d love to have children with Nicolas. I hope to, if I am young enough. It would be a dream.” Nevertheless, she has ruled out fertility programs. “If it comes, I’d be the happiest person in the world, but if it doesn’t come, I’m not going to tempt the Devil.” Lighting another slim cigarette, Carla says, “If life doesn’t give me another child, well, it has given me so much already.”
Her new album, Comme Si de Rien N’Était (As If Nothing Happened), was released on July 11. She will not be able to do a concert tour, but she and her husband both want her to continue her career. “What will the balance be between public and private because she is a public figure?” asks Alain Minc, the chairman of the board of Le Monde and a close friend of Sarkozy’s. “It’s absolutely uncharted territory.” No one is more keenly aware than Carla herself that just one year ago she was a dumped single mother at a low point of her life. She has gone back into analysis and jokes that even her therapist is dumbfounded by all that has changed in her life. “It’s unbelievable,” she says, giggling and burying her face in a sofa pillow. “I was Italian! How can I be the First Lady of France?”
Jacques Séguéla has the answer: “We are the country of love.”
Copyright : Vanity Fair.
Voir l'article original : VANITY FAIR.
2 commentaires
victoryerly
La garden party à l’elysée, proposition de changement d’orientation :
Proposition de l’étalon nombre de RSA annuel soit 4000 euros ( seule l’élite des Rsaistes touchent 450 euros par mois) afin d' analyser les budgets de l’Etat :
exemple la garden party de l’elysée en 2009 a coûté 732826 euros ( 7500 invités, une journée) soit 183, 20 RSA annuel (183 personnes recevant le minimum estimé vital pour survivre pendant un an).
Critique de cette proposition d’étalon :
les rsaistes ne payent pas d’impôt, il n’est pas possible de prendre pour étalon un étalon qui dépende de l’existence même de l’impôt, ainsi il est proposé d’inviter à la garden party toutes les personnes qui payent le plus d’impôt et qui ne se payent pas les services d’avocats fiscalistes afin d’en faire les véritables héros de cette journée célébrant la naissance de la République. Mais en existent-ils seulement ?
la fee clochette