THE SUBJECTS of King Nicolas and Queen Carla will learn a little more about France's first couple from Carla and Nicolas: The True Story, a syrupy soap opera of a book to be released this week.
The couple's first meeting, at the home of the retired advertising executive Jacques Séguela last November, is already the stuff of popular legend. It is recounted in eight pages of excerpts published by Le Pointmagazine yesterday. "It was instant," Ms Bruni-Sarkozy told the book's authors. "I didn't expect someone so funny, so lively. His physique, his charm and his intelligence seduced me. He has five or six brains . . . "
Six dinner guests witnessed the presidential coup de foudre. "The president had eyes only for [Bruni]," one of them told the authors. "Several times, Carla Bruni's hair grazed the president . . . Not only is Nicolas Sarkozy subjugated by her, he's absolutely crazy . . . He doesn't stop flattering her all evening . . . They act as if they're alone in the room. Nothing else and no one else matters to them. The dinner ends around 2am. Carla's obviously tipsy; she's really drunk and smoked a lot! At the end of the meal, she asks the president if he has a car."
Ms Bruni invited Mr Sarkozy to dinner at her house near the Porte d'Auteuil the following evening. "By candlelight, and under the huge skylight over the bedroom," the book tells us, "the head of state and the singer will, for the first time, discover one another."
True Storyis equally explicit about the First Lady's past. Early in their romance, Mr Sarkozy received two of her many ex-lovers at the Élysée Palace on the same day. Carla stayed at her home in Auteuil, laughing.
Ms Bruni was driven to Mr Séguela's dinner party by the former education minister Luc Ferry and his wife Marie-Caroline. Mr Ferry was another ex-lover, who has commented ironically, "I was between [the former socialist prime minister] Laurent Fabius and Mick Jagger."
True Storyreveals the tense relationship between Ms Bruni and the president's former favourite, the now embattled justice minister Rachida Dati.
On New Year's eve, the book says, Ms Bruni and Ms Dati walked through the bedroom of the Élysée Palace. "You would have liked to occupy it, wouldn't you?" Ms Bruni said to Ms Dati. The minister told a journalist that Ms Bruni "can't stand me because I'm close to [Sarkozy's previous wife] Cécilia."
Soon after the wedding on February 2nd, the new First Lady ordered Ms Dati to stop sending her husband text messages. Ms Bruni has appeared in public with her husband only once since their triumphal visit to London in late March.
On May 27th, the couple left the Élysée Palace at 4.15am to go to the wholesale food market at Rungis. As she yawned among the butchers and vegetable vendors, one couldn't help thinking of Marie-Antoinette pretending to be a milkmaid.
Mr Sarkozy and Ms Bruni will this morning attend the funeral of the designer Yves Saint-Laurent, whose clothes Ms Bruni used to model.