Le Président Doth Protest Too Much

A THIN-SKINNED NICOLAS SARKOZY TAKES ON THE PRESS.

Paris

It’s hard to think of anything Nicolas Sarkozy could have done worse in his handling of le scandale (also known, somewhat unimaginatively, as Twittergate) these past two weeks. What started as vague Internet rumors and idle post-cheese course dinner-party gossip on the love life of the French president and his third wife—safely insulated from any media airing by some of the most stringent privacy laws this side of Beijing—has morphed into a major political crisis, threatening, as no mere opinion poll ratings could, Sarkozy’s bid for reelection in 2012.

The facts, if you can call them that, are a couple of blog and Twitter posts, soon alluded to on France’s answer to the HuffPost, LePost.fr, suggesting that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy had allegedly moved in with award-winning singer Benjamin Biolay (who once worked on one of her albums) while her husband, supposedly on the rebound, was said to have been giving the benefit of his presidential experience to environment minister (and French karate champion) Chantal Jouanno.

The rumors, carefully avoided by the mainstream French media, fully aware of guaranteed dire judicial and political fallout, then surfaced in the British tabloid press, which went at it with glee, even a certain insouciance. Sarkozy and Madame have from the start been a staple of the London popular newspapers, a piñata sent from heaven to revive flagging sales and casual anti-French prejudice (tinged with envy: any poll run by the Sun or the Daily Mail would find its readers convinced that the elevator-shoed poison dwarf ruling France has more fun and a better sex life than 90 percent of them). British tabloids have bid at auction on nude pictures of Carla Bruni, run endless jokes on Sarkozy’s lack of height (and Carla’s occasional “wardrobe malfunctions,” Fleet Street code for visible lack of undergarments), commented on Sarko’s custom-made low-slung lecterns, alleged that he planned to slight the queen at the last D-Day celebrations (with more than a bit of help from White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on that one), have seemingly never quoted La Bruni’s name without mentioning her string of famous ex-lovers (Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Donald Trump .  .  .), and in general been having what they see as clean, harmless fun.

So everyone was flabbergasted when, far from ignoring the whole brouhaha in dignified fashion, the Elysée mounted a campaign against what Pierre Charon, a senior Elysée press adviser and old political pal of Sarkozy’s, described as “an international plot by foreign financial interests, aimed at sabotaging the 2011 French presidency of the G20.” “These rumors have cropped up in coordinated fashion,” charged Thierry Herzog, the Sarkozys’ lawyer. “Someone must be behind this.”

There followed, in the age-old French tradition, a witch hunt. A blogger and the web editor of Le Journal du Dimanche who had alluded to the rumors were promptly sacked by their publisher, Hachette-Filipacchi Presse, which happens to be owned by a crony of Sarkozy’s, Arnaud Lagardère, the missile and aerospace manufacturer. (Hachette-Filipacchi is a perilous place to mention the president’s private affairs: The editor of Paris Match, the celebrity weekly, was similarly fired two years ago for having run a picture of Cécilia Sarkozy, the president’s previous wife, with the man she’s now remarried to, on a New York street.) Hachette-Filipacchi also requested a judicial inquiry into the “fraudulent entry of data into a computer network,” strongly believed to have been pushed for by Sarkozy. Charon, meanwhile, settling some private scores, accused former justice minister Rachida Dati, now exiled in disgrace to Brussels as a Euro-MP, of spreading the rumors (probably true, but then they were on everyone’s lips) and even manufacturing them (unlikely). The glamorous Dati hit back, posing as a victim (“My phones were tapped!”) and threatening lawsuits of her own.

If the hoped-for effect was the cowing of the French press, predictably, for all but the Elysée grand strategists, it backfired. Timid (and underfinanced) the Paris newspapers may be, but all this legal activity gave them the perfect excuse: They reported on the cases, never (heaven forbid!) the actual rumors. By early April, all but the names in play were the subject of French front page stories, cover features, and TV news flashes. The last veil was then ripped by Biolay himself, egged on, it was said, by Carla Bruni, who sued France’s respected but little-watched international news channel France 24 for mentioning him in a review of the foreign press coverage, and thereby put himself in the glare of any media attention he had until then managed to escape.

By this time Sarko, having first dismissed at length a Sky news interviewer during a visit to London (“I don’t have even half a second to consider these absurdities .  .  . ”), found himself reduced to sending his wife onto the morning radio talk shows and such friendly venues as Madame Figaro, the women’s supplement of Paris’s most respectful daily, to decry, in pained but restrained tones, the vulgarity and cheapening nature of it all. Bruni, who has more experience of the foreign celebrity media than her husband, laughed off any suggestion of conspiracy, protested that Dati was “a friend,” and denied that any police investigations had been ordered. (Unfortunately for her, Bernard Squarcini, the head of DCRI, French homeland security, contradicted her hours later.)

L’Affaire is by no means over. Last week Sarko, in Washington, was again quizzed, this time in a Katie Couric interview on Iran’s nuclear program. (Couric gave him a much easier time than she did, say, Sarah Palin: “It must get slightly annoying?” she commiserated about the coverage of his private life.) Even austere newspapers like Le Monde have run many column inches on the consequences for Sarkozy’s reelection in two years. “Can the president keep his cool?” is the implicit question.

As with every ailing regime, leaks now gush out, in print, of every instance of Sarkozy weakness—how he was nearly incapacitated by his 2007 divorce; how he has surrounded himself with courtiers who daren’t warn him of obvious mistakes. (Pierre Charon was described to me by an Elysée aide as “un amuseur, someone who, 500 years ago, would have worn a parti-colored costume and a hat with bells on around the king.”) What makes all this unfortunate is that Sarkozy is still sensible in his political decisions​—reforming France’s cumbersome state pension system and, abroad, pushing for tougher sanctions on Iran, to cite just two. But unlike most of his predecessors (recall Mitterrand who for 14 years hid the existence of two parallel families, in addition to his legal one, from the public, using the vast resources of the French state), Sarkozy is no cynic. If you prick him, he does bleed. And if you wrong him, he shall want revenge.

© Copyright The Weekly Standard & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2010

2012 Olympics: Maybe these Calais burghers are not so silly after all

The idea that Calais becomes English for the Olympics could be a cunning plan, reveals Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

By no yardstick could you call the spectacularly tin-eared president of the département of Pas-de-Calais a political star. When you Google Dominique Dupilet's name in the French version of the search engine, nothing more recent than 2009 crops up – and that's his own YouTube channel, not exactly a riot of activity with 185 views for his most-watched speech (on illegal immigration).

Yet M Dupilet has achieved by stealth what the force of English arms failed to do over those long centuries: he has handed over Calais. His region, he announced blithely, planned to "rebrand itself part of Britain" in order to catch part of the 2012 Olympics business. He'd always considered, he explained, "that we are the south of England". When Paris lost out to London in a bid to host the 2012 Games, this one Frenchman was busy, in his own words, "hoisting up the British flag". Soon, the département had quietly voted some 100 million euros (close to £90 million) of French taxpayers' money to upgrade hotels and sports installations. Teams from Uzbekistan, Senegal and Chad – to name but a few – have already signed up to train in "our weather conditions, so similar to London's".

Until recently, the whole initiative, code-named "Mission 2012", was being kept under the radar, M Dupilet told The Wall Street Journal, "because we didn't want to attract competition". Outrage in the rest of the country would be a more likely explanation. The English might be taught that Mary Tudor died with Calais engraved on her heart – but as early as the Neuvième (the class for 10-year-olds), French children are told of the 11-month siege by the army of Edward III in the Hundred Years' War, ending in 1347 with the surrender of the starved Calaisiens.

For the city to be spared, Edward commanded that six of its leading citizens surrender for execution. (They were finally reprieved, earning Edward the tag "The Merciful".) These Burghers of Calais – barefoot, in shifts, with nooses round their necks – were sculpted by Rodin on a commission from Calais City Hall in 1880 (one of the bronze casts, purchased in 1911, stands near the Houses of Parliament).

Once you add the iconic effect of a major work of art to the role of Calais in France's national narrative, you can see that of all French cities, this would be the worst in which to pull a stunt like Dupilet's. It's not that we haven't learnt to value the British over the years, but some things still rankle. Bordeaux can call itself British-spirited all it wants. Dordogne can train more cricketers than joueurs de pétanque, and we'll smile fondly. Calais, not so much.

Yet has M Dupilet really betrayed his country, or is this a cunning plan to put one over our old friends the English? Although the officials in Calais's city hall expressed outrage when I informed them of his comments ("Quoi? Non!" was the response from the mayor's office), Dupilet's team has its eye on the main chance. "The Argentines and the Quebecers have few affinities with the British," says the head of the local Office du Tourisme delicately. "They might be happier training here." Just in case you missed the point, listen to that famed Anglophile, Dominique Dupilet: "Who wants to go to Birmingham? In Pas-de-Calais, the French lifestyle is better. And as for the food over there, well, forget it."

Still, his voters might not have such a hospitable attitude. The most popular French film of 1935 was a star-studded comedy by Jacques Becker, called Carnival in Flanders, which told the story of a Flemish town threatened by Spanish occupation. The men decide to play dead and hide; the women receive the hidalgos in their homes (and sometimes in their beds). As the hordes prepare to descend, I wonder if M Dupilet's initiative shouldn't be renamed Carnival in Calais.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2010

Turning our backs on the Queen

Because of health and safety, we are no longer expected to walk backwards before the Queen, observes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

So 'elf'n'safety have proved that they outrank the House of Windsor. From now on, no one, except for two particular courtiers and Jack Straw, the Lord Chancellor, will walk backwards from the presence of the Queen. The practice is deemed too dangerous, we are told, but Her Majesty can't bring herself to see it disappear altogether.

In anyone else, you would suspect that this would derive from the levity that the sight presents (and the irrational hope, perhaps, that Lord Irvine might one day return to the Lord Chancellor's office). But in the case of the Queen, what you see is what you get. Whatever her personal preferences, she is resolved to follow the law of the land at all times.

I wonder, though, how it was decided that the Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps and the Queen's equerry would be the ones selected. Did the current holders, Charles Gray and Andy Calame, draw lots? Did they have to pass a strenuous physical exam? Will they be forced to carry beepers that whistle out a warning to passers-by during the procedure, like articulated lorries? And hasn't Mr Straw done enough backing down to last a lifetime?

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009

Twisted histories last the longest

Writers from Shakespeare to Walter Scott have fired our imaginations with gross but entertaining fallacies, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

According to a new study, Hollywood films that take liberties with the past damage people's knowledge of history – even when they once knew the correct facts. But while this is likely true, it's nothing new. Writers from Shakespeare to Walter Scott have fired our imaginations with gross but entertaining fallacies: Cleopatra, Richard the Lionheart and Richard III have never recovered from the extreme makeovers they received according to Elizabethan or Victorian tastes.

Alexandre Dumas rewrote the Counter-Reformation in France; Schiller created folk heroes from scratch (a revisionism abetted and amplified by the Italian librettists employed by Donizetti, Bellini or Verdi).

Dickens's image of the French Revolution was 100 times more powerful than Carlyle's, imprinting the English mind with a deep distrust of liberté, egalité et fraternité. And the best historians were unable to salvage the Emperor Nero's reputation after the hatchet-job in Henryk Sienkiewicz's best-seller, Quo Vadis.

On screen, too, for every painstakingly accurate – yes, superbly entertaining – I, Claudius, there are a dozen Troys, Gladiators and Romes. And yet even if they scramble the viewer's knowledge, these works still send people in droves to classical history courses, and fire up lasting enthusiasms. Old Carlyle can't have recruited a tenth of the amount.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009

Harriet Harman and Ségolène Royal: sisters under the skin

Harriet Harman's political style, if nothing else, recalls the bossiness of French socialist Ségolène Royal.

Ségolène Royal: a firm believer that the state knows best Photo: Reuters

What is it with Socialist women politicians and their seemingly uncontrollable urge to give feminism a bad name? As part of the improbable duo left in charge during Gordon Brown’s Scottish staycation, Harriet Harman managed the feat of making Lord Mandelson seem like a safe pair of hands. Between criticising men (“they can’t be left running things on their own”) and turf-brawling with Jack Straw’s mandarins over the announcement of new measures for rape victims, Miss Harman certainly made a lasting impression.

Love her or hate her, you can’t ignore her. In fact, that seems to be the plan – to make herself so omnipresent, whether out of genuine conviction or tactical positioning, that her ascension to the leadership becomes inevitable.

Yet one Continental example should serve as a warning. Ségolène Royal, the French Socialist, rammed her candidacy for the presidency through her party’s primaries with exactly the same combination of ostentatious feminism and obsessive self-promotion. Whenever she was rebuked for one of her numerous gaffes (from praising the “speed” of the Chinese law courts, to being hoaxed by a comedian into supporting Québecois and Corsican independence, to getting the number of French nuclear submarines wrong), Royal blamed the attitude of men – whether her adversary, Nicolas Sarkozy, or her own party grandees – faced with a female candidate.

Soon, any question she didn’t wish to answer was brushed aside angrily on feminist grounds. “You wouldn’t dare pose such a question to a man,” she spat at a bemused New York Times reporter who asked her to outline her foreign policy.

Like Harman, Ségolène comes from a privileged background. The daughter of a career officer, she was educated in select Catholic schools. Again like Harman, her accent combines the populist vowels more often heard from shop stewards with the preachy – occasionally downright messianic – overtones of the Sunday sermon. She attended ENA, the elite government school that has produced eight of France’s last 15 prime ministers, two of six presidents, almost half the cabinet and almost the entirety of the civil service elite.

ENA does produce competent people, but they are often accused, with good reason, of being detached from everyday reality. Few “énarques” have any experience of the private sector; far fewer are entrepreneurs. They have abstract notions of what it means to meet a payroll, and are great believers in social engineering and that the state knows best. Sound familiar?

Of course, Ségolène differs from her British counterpart in one crucial aspect – although blessed with a good figure and a lovely oval face, there has been much speculation that she underwent radical cosmetic surgery to firm up her jaw, accentuate her cheekbones and give her a radiant smile. (She has never commented, but comparing the cover of an early autobiography raises certain questions.)

The British don’t object to their women politicians looking more schoolmarmish than glamorous, and they might mistrust the kind of unmarried glamourpuss who, after a hard-fought campaign, kicks out the father of her four children, and gets chased by the paparazzi during the holidays she spends with her new beau. Over the Channel, it’s a non-issue. Even among French feminists, some attention is paid to looks and to fashion.

On the other hand, Ségolène, like Harriet, has few women friends and supporters. Her colleagues find her arrogant and unpredictable: her feminism is on her terms only. More reticent (and competent) female politicians are known to complain in private that Ségolène’s grandstanding sets back women’s political advances. “She fabricates issues where progress had already been achieved,” Michèle Alliot-Marie, one of the Sarkozy government mainstays, has complained.

But as both Harriet and Ségolène might tell you, when you’re a self-proclaimed champion of women everywhere, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009

I'll admit it, the French don't get Brüno

Sacha Baron Cohen's latest caricature is just a big bully, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

Something tells me that we French are going to have a problem with Brüno, the Sacha Baron Cohen alter ego who is threatening to do for Austria what Borat did for Kazakhstan. On the other side of the Atlantic, one effete Euro-metrosexual may look like any other, as he prances around pranking rednecks and Paula Abdul alike. But we’re not buying it.

Italian fashion, we can accept. British fashion, even – just look at the swell job we gave John Galliano at Dior. But a gay Austrian fashion reporter? To the Parisian, Austrian fashion doesn’t extend beyond field-green loden coats, anything with edelweiss flowers embroidered on it, and those voluminous silk curtains with puffball sleeves that women wear at the Salzburg Festival. Similarly, the idea of a gay Austrian doesn’t so much bring up the catwalk as the late Jörg Haider, the neo-Nazi politician. (Bet he went for leather instead of hot pants, though.)



The problem is that while stereotyping other countries, then happily slagging them off, is a sport enjoyed by all, there’s surprisingly little overlap between nations. The English think of Americans as bullying, simplistic colonials, over-fed and over here, given to murdering the language with their excessively loud voices. The French mutter darkly about a Yankee masterplan to destroy Gallic culture, secretly hatched by Disney, Google and the CIA. Many Islamists see blasphemous, licentious heathens: Sayyid Qutb, the leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, spent a year at a Bible Belt college in the Forties and came back horrified by the innocent community dances held in church halls.

Such caricatures, of course, tell us as much about those who hold them as their target. When Brüno camped it up last week on the Champs-Elysées, cracking jokes about Carla Bruni’s love life, he was acting like a typical Brit – only you, it seems, are unable to accept the fact that a 40-year-old woman is comfortable with having had lovers. Of course, we’re just as bad: no amount of Michelin rosettes for the likes of Gordon Ramsay will erase our view of the British as a nation bred on over-cooked meat served with improbable jams and peas hard enough to be used for grapeshot, washed down with warm beer or gallons of nut-brown tea.

In French eyes, the British manage to have sex crimes but no sex lives (replaced by hotwater bottles from Boots); you are simultaneously perfidious and worship "le fair play"; you have the raunchiest tabloids and the most Victorian assumptions about how politicians should behave in private; as with the ducks you so like to shoot, your males are better dressed than your females; and, of course, you poisoned Napoleon.

As Baron Cohen proved with Borat, such stereotypes lend themselves to being exploited. While the British are suspicious of French men, expecting a suspiciously natty, chain-smoking poseur, always ready with a flowery compliment or Brussels directive, you paint us Frenchwomen in a more flattering light. We are Basil Fawlty’s unattainable charmer, Madame Peignoir, or Juliette Binoche in Damage: thinner, better dressers, always hostesses, never housewives.

Baron Cohen’s problem as we see it is that he is a typical product of a public-school, Oxbridge education, and of Britain’s unique tolerance for shock tactics. You laud him as an example of cuttingedge Jewish humour; to us, he has much more in common with Monty Python or the Christmas panto. Like Borat, Brüno uses the methods of the school bully, as much behind the camera as in front of it – those who complain, like the Kazakh foreign minister or poor Paula Abdul, are dripping wet, can’t-take-a-joke spoilsports.

Or perhaps that’s just my own prejudices showing.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009

The D-Day shindig has been bad news for Sarkozy

The French president may rue the day he thought up this photo-op, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

As Nicolas Sarkozy prepares for the hardest-won photo-op of his presidency – the D-Day commemorations on the Normandy beaches, starring Barack Obama, with the Prince of Wales and Gordon Brown as last-minute supporting players – he could be forgiven for thinking himself ill-used. What started as a mid-scale, bilateral event at the American military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer (which is US soil, donated by France in perpetuity) has been successively targeted by the big guns of the Daily Mail, Downing Street, Sarkozy's socialist opposition, and the White House Communications Office.

Admittedly, Sarko's own intentions weren't entirely selfless. Yes, he is the first president since de Gaulle to pay constant and sincere homage to veterans of the Second World War and La Résistance (he was brought up by his arch-Gaullist maternal grandfather, a Jewish physician who was banned from practising during the Nazi occupation and had to go into hiding). But Sarkozy is also very aware that in the run-up to the European elections, held tomorrow over here, Obama is the ultimate arm-candy, a little touch of Yes-We-Can on the hustings.

A year ago, when Obama, still on the campaign trail, had just given his Berlin speech, Sarko invited him for a joint press conference at the Elysée, deploying all the ceremony usually reserved for heads of state. The two were bestest buddies, joking that they had reconciled their two countries after the froideur of George W Bush, Jacques Chirac and "freedom fries".

But since that golden moment – in fact, since Obama's election victory – the most pro-American French president ever has been snubbed. In vain did Sarko angle, time and again, for an invitation to Washington (he would have loved those DVDs that Gordon brought home). In vain did he plea for a repeat of the Elysée event in April. The Obamas, visiting Strasbourg for the Nato summit just after France re-joined the organisation, had no time, positively no time, to swing by Paris: the Bruni-Sarkozys had to make do with a short walkabout in Alsace. Adding insult to injury, Obama made the case for admitting Turkey into the EU, something both Sarkozy and Germany's Angela Merkel are dead set against.

As for today's D-Day visit, which will mobilise several platoons of gendarmes and practically cordon off Normandy (7,000 official guests are expected, including Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks), the White House had – as of yesterday morning – still not given a firm schedule to the Elysée, whose hyper-professional flacks were uncharacteristically briefing against their American counterparts. No, Mr Obama had not accepted the dinner invitation on Friday; there would only be a working lunch in Caen today. Yes, Mrs Obama and her daughters would be staying in Paris over the weekend, but their plans were "uncertain"; it was a "private visit".

However, it was the fracas involving the Queen's invitation – or the lack of it – that really stirred things up. As it happens, nobody in Paris reacted at first to the accusation of a snub to Buckingham Palace. The French, who were originally planning to have Sarkozy attend a specific French-American ceremony, acceded to Downing Street's request that Gordon Brown tag along. But it was only when Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, insisted that Mr Obama wanted the Queen to attend, and was "working with those involved to see if we can make that happen", that the whole affaire took off.

The French opposition, which is expected to trail behind Sarkozy's UMP party in the Euro-elections tomorrow, realised that while French law forbids political campaigning from midnight onwards on the Saturday before a Sunday poll, Sarkozy would be on every television screen before the vote, saying worthy, statesmanlike things. They grabbed the Obama-validated royal story and ran with it. Sarkozy was pelted with insults by every opposition candidate in the country, who flew – with no sense of irony – to the defence of Britain, usually painted as the fly in the Euro-ointment. Sarkozy's behaviour towards Her Majesty was that of a cad, a buffoon, a jerk, a pathetic human being with no manners – a bad European, and a worse Frenchman.

Then, into this heated atmosphere, came the translation of Obama's speech in Cairo. Fabricated outrage was instantly replaced by very real indignation, in a country where the neutrality of the public space is sacrosanct. Obama's pointed words defending the hijab aroused the ire of feminists, teachers' unions, and even moderate Muslim groups, who have come to a civilised arrangement with the headscarf law, which bans the conspicuous display of religious symbols in schools. Equally vocal were France's political parties – not least the president's own.

For the first time, newspaper websites were full of anti-Obama comments – a decided first in France. However much he looked forward to standing shoulder to shoulder with the US president, Sarko may rue the day he dreamt up this D-Day photo-op.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009

Carla Bruni is fine - it's Sarkozy the neighbours can't handle

Sarko jogs early in the morning, accompanied by a retinue of aides and protection officers; has breakfast before 7am; then zooms to the office in a motorcade of bulletproof limousines, all sirens blaring. Nobody in rue Pierre-Guérin can sleep in, says Anne Elisabeth Moutet.

As every deal-deprived Paris estate agent enviously knows, Carla Bruni, épouse Sarkozy, is house-hunting. Her pretty 5,000 sq ft house on rue Pierre-Guérin, in the depths of the very bourgeois 16th arrondissement, is proving inconvenient as main presidential residence.

As long as Carla lived there with her cat, her dog, and her son Aurélien – whose father, philosopher Raphaël Enthoven, conveniently resides across the garden in another building – everything was hunky-dory, not least with her staid neighbours, who could recognise une jeune fille de bonne famille; one of theirs, however Bohemian.

Carla was always polite; if she gave parties, apologetic handwritten notes warned of possible disturbances; her in-house recording studio was soundproof.

Enter Nicolas Sarkozy, aka le Président bling-bling. Suddenly, residents’ cars parked on the quiet rue Pierre-Guérin are moved to make room for police protection and back-up; uniformed flics start checking the IDs of passers-bys; half the street’s wheelie bins (including the noisy glass-container ones) are moved at all hours to prevent terrorists using them for bombs; and everyone’s life is made thoroughly miserable.

Sarko jogs early in the morning, accompanied by a retinue of aides and protection officers; has breakfast before 7am; then zooms to the office in a motorcade of bulletproof limousines, all sirens blaring. Nobody in rue Pierre-Guérin can sleep in.

Sarko has famously said that he would “never yield to the pressure of the street”; but he meant the demonstrations the French so appreciate. The pressure of the Seizième rue was apparently harder to bear. And so Carla and Nicolas have been looking at suitable places to buy. It is, after all, the right time for it – Paris house prices have fallen by an average 25 per cent. The happy couple have looked at a 12 million euro former Carmelite monastery not far from Carla’s present address. Last week, they were spotted at Yves Saint Laurent’s old pad on rue de Babylone.

Wags have made a lot of the fact that Carla’s best-known old flame, Mick Jagger, owns two flats in the same building; but that’s not something Sarkozy will object to – if anything, he finds it an added attraction. A tribal man, he early on forced the bewildered Enthoven to call him tu; as the father of his wife’s son, he explained, he was now “part of the family”.

* The French are bemused by the MPs’ expenses scandal. French MPs, who are more or less paid the same amount as their British counterparts, have for a long time been in the habit of employing wives and relatives as parliamentary aides, a practice no one bats an eyelid about. They do not get large expenses, but enjoy low-interest bank loans, free first-class train tickets, and a good pension and health coverage plans. Those who do spend, spend, spend are Cabinet ministers. Rachida Dati famously claimed for tights and make-up.

* When former president Jacques Chirac heard that Google was planning to digitise all books, including French ones, with Google Books, he nearly blew a gasket. A commercial, American company? A large budget was immediately allotted to a committee of upper civil servants to create the digital library that would Save French Culture. Alas, three years later, Gallica, the Bibliothèque nationale de France website, is still unable to provide more than a couple of thousand electronic books, so that it is still easier to read online Balzac, Molière or Proust in English at Project Gutenberg than in the original French.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009