Bruni’s unlikely love

It takes a special kind of man to make Carla Bruni—Italian heiress, supermodel, and songstress—settle down, said Arthur Dreyfus in Vogue Paris. Nicolas Sarkozy is just such a fellow. They met in 2007, when the then French president was still smarting from his divorce. “I didn’t have preconceived ideas about Nicolas Sarkozy,” she says. “When I saw him I saw his skin, I saw his hands, I saw how he moved. I saw his way of speaking. I was attracted to him straightaway. The fact that he was president was neither here nor there.” Sarkozy, she discovered, is an extremely “virile” man—“a man with whom I have become a lot more of a woman. He devoured the little boy inside me. I like very seductive men, beauty doesn’t always come into it.” He has taught her a great deal. “I was not much of a citizen before getting married,” she admits. “I belonged to a colorful group of people on the Left. For me, the Left was openness toward the world, tolerance, and the absence of judgment. But I have discovered that Nicolas was all that. He was constantly open to my friends, he’s one of the few people in politics who is not sectarian. All of the reasons I had for being on the Left, I found them united in a man who was supposed to be of the Right.”