FRANCE:It's 'a beautiful love story', but Nicolas and Carla do not agree on everything, writes Lara Marlowe
Will the French people embrace the rich, beautiful and famous woman who became France's first lady when she married president Nicolas Sarkozy on Saturday? And will their wedding reverse the 24-point drop in Sarkozy's popularity rating that began when he met Carla Bruni less than three months ago? Or will the world's most finicky people find fault with the woman who has everything?
They might reproach her for posing nude save for a pair of thigh-high boots and a wedding band in a Spanish magazine - albeit before the whirlwind romance. It may shock them to see la première dame in a television advertisement, pointing an imaginary gun at a Lancia car that bursts into flames.
Then there are all those past paramours: Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Kevin Costner, Laurent Fabius, Donald Trump . . . The third Mrs Sarkozy nonetheless wore a white Hermès dress for her first wedding. A single mother, she had already moved into the Élysée Palace with her young son Aurélien.
Not one image of the nuptials has been released, and it fell upon a lowly official, François Lebel, the mayor of Paris's eighth arrondissement, where the Élysée is located, to announce the marriage in an interview with Europe 1 radio station.
The palace confirmed the news several hours later, in a one-sentence communique saying, "Madame Carla Bruni Tedeschi and Monsieur Nicolas Sarkozy announce that they married this morning in the presence of their families in the strictest privacy."
Lebel said the marriage took place in a first-floor stateroom at the Élysée, in the presence of about 20 close friends and relatives.
"It lasted about 20 minutes. The bride was in white. She was ravishing, as usual. The groom wasn't bad either."
After exchanging wedding bands, the newlyweds kissed and guests toasted them with "a little orange juice", he added. Really, Monsieur Lebel? Orange juice?
The mayor said France's first couple were "moved and in love", an impression reiterated by Bruni's mother, Marisa. "It's a beautiful love story," she said. "Carla was very emotional, and so was I. It's a very important wedding for both Italy and France."
Bruni was born into a family of Italian industrialists 40 years ago. The Bruni-Tedeschis moved to Paris when she was a child, during a rash of kidnapping by the Red Brigades. She grew up in a castle in northern Italy, a lavish apartment in Paris's 16th arrondissement, a Swiss finishing school and a luxurious villa on the French riviera.
Sarkozy is the first French president to have divorced in office, and the second (after Gaston Doumergue in 1931) to have married at the Élysée. Napoleon Bonaparte, to whom he is often compared, divorced and remarried while he was emperor of France.
The couple spent their wedding night at La Lanterne, the presidential weekend residence on the grounds of Versailles. Numerous cars were seen driving up to the mansion on Saturday night, but no details of the reception have emerged.
True to his reputation as "speedy Sarkozy", the French president met, seduced and married Bruni in just 80 days. After his divorce from his second wife, Cécilia, was announced on October 18th, a demoralised Sarkozy was secretly hospitalised for a throat infection and continued to wear his wedding band to show he wasn't the one who wanted the rupture.
"I'm tired of dining alone at the Élysée," he told Jacques Séguela, the patriarch of French advertising and public relations. "Why don't you invite me to dinner?"
Bruni, whose album Quelqu'un m'a dit . . . sold two million copies worldwide, reportedly sang to Sarkozy at Séguela's dinner. She asked him to drop her home that night, and was surprised when he waited several days to phone her.
The stages of their romance - from Disneyland Paris to Egypt to Jordan - sold millions of glossy magazines but backfired by portraying the president as a jet-setter at a time when he's telling the French to work harder.
The wedding consummated Sarkozy's revenge against his second wife, who may soon marry the man for whom she left him, Richard Attias, the public relations executive who organised the Davos World Economic Forum.
Some observers are amazed that the unconventional Bruni has done something so conventional as to marry. In a now famous interview, she told Le Figaro last year: "I am a tamer of men, a cat, an Italian . . . Monogamy bores me terribly."
But protocol made the Sarkozy-Bruni cohabitation untenable. Sarkozy couldn't take his fiancee to the Taj Mahal last month because Indian officials objected.
He told journalists in India that he would not be alone when he is received by Queen Elizabeth on a state visit to England next month, or at the Beijing Olympics next summer.
The French president's marriage to one of the world's most beautiful women feels like another instalment in the Hollywood saga of the life of Nicolas Sarkozy. The French may learn to love their Italian first lady, but will she tire of her new role? On their wedding day, Sarkozy was twice distracted by the war in Chad. Today he has an 8.15am appointment with steel workers whose jobs are threatened in Moselle, eastern France.
The wedding has shown, yet again, Sarkozy's extraordinary talent for pulling all and sundry into his orbit. Séguela was close to the late socialist president François Mitterrand. Mathilde Agostinelli, one of the couple's witnesses, was Cécilia Sarkozy's best friend.
Bruni supported Ségolène Royal during last year's presidential campaign, saying, "I'll always vote for the left, as my parents always did."
More recently she campaigned against Sarkozy's immigration policy. "My indignation [ over the requirement that immigrants submit to DNA tests] was immediate," she told Elle magazine. "I hate the 'selection' implied by [ Sarkozy's policy of] 'chosen immigration'. What would have happened to me if my parents had been forced to take DNA tests?"
Indeed, Paris Match magazine recently explained the confusion over the terms "father" and "stepfather" in reports about Bruni. Her biological father is an Italian living in Brazil, who had a six-year affair with her mother. "The father is the one who gives the name," Carla Bruni said, "Monsieur Bruni-Tedeschi is my father."