Nicolas & Carla & Bill & Hillary: menages old and new.(FRANCE)(Nicolas Sarkozy, Carla Bruni; Bill and Hillary Clinton)

ONCE, a few years ago, I was sitting outdoors at La Palette, a Paris cafe on rue de Seine. I was there with a French friend of mine, and it was one of those sunny, chilly Paris afternoons designed for sitting outside with a cigarette and a glass of wine, engaging in moody and intermittent conversation.

A guy sat down next to us who was dressed, even by French standards, in an absurd getup: on his feet, a pair of lime green canvas sneakers; on his body, a clingy white T-shirt and a pair of tiny, thigh-squeezing shorts; and around his neck, a thick wool scarf, wrapped to resemble an enormous blue bagel.

I gathered up all of the various verb tenses, noun phrases, and polite icebreakers I'd had rattling around in my head since freshman year, ignored the silent protests of my Parisian friend, turned to the crazy man, and asked, as elegantly as I could, Buddy, what's up with the outfit?

Like the best of his countrymen, he was pleased to be able to explain his particular eccentricity. You see, he said, pointing to what we'll call, for the purposes of this discussion, his lap, I am always hot down there. And then, pointing to his head, But I am also always cold up here. "Je suis comme ca, moi," he added.

France: hot down there, cold up here. Which brings us to this: The president of France has a girlfriend.

Correction: a hot girlfriend. But for once, that's all he's got--there's no stoic, soigne wife around to keep things adult and restrained. When the dashing, unpredictable, master-of-the-scarf Nicolas Sarkozy and his second wife, Cecilia, finally got around to getting a divorce last year, he took up pretty immediately with Carla Bruni, a fashion model turned singer-songwriter, whose smoky voice and sad-rueful songs can be easily downloaded on iTunes, or via her Facebook or MySpace pages. Which is, you know, kind of cool. Put it this way: Mme. Chirac, Carla Bruni's stately predecessor in the Elysee Palace, had a closetful of Chanel but she was not on MySpace.

This is all pretty new stuff for France, which since the earliest of the Louis has prided itself on its restrained sexiness, a cosmopolitan blend of southern Latin passion (the hot down there) and chilly northern reserve (the cold up here).