Nowhere Woman.(Yasmina Reza )

In 2006, Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then the Interior Minister of France, agreed to let the playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza follow him, as part of his inner circle, while he campaigned for the Presidency. The proposal came without any pretense on her part of servility or of discretion in how she would portray him. Reza is an adversarial writer even in her tender moments, which are infrequent, and she has a gift for derision which Flaubert might have admired. One has to wonder what Sarkozy was thinking. But he gamely countered with his own dare. "Even if you demolish me, you will elevate me," he boasted to her at the outset. "I don't think I did either," Reza told me, in January, in Paris, "but I might have wounded his amour propre. The truth does that."

"Dawn, Dusk or Night" was published in France shortly after Sarkozy's victory, in 2007. (Their last interview and, Reza wrote, their only attempt at a real conversation took place at the Elysee Palace.) It created a sensation, selling some three hundred thousand copies, although reviewers could not agree what to make of it: it was "too close," "too detached," "cruel," "savory," "photoshopped prose," "lucid," "like pictures from a spy satellite," "caustic," "a literary curiosity," and a "literary monument." "Sometimes," one commentator remarked, "the hunter is more interesting than the prey."

Reza distilled her notes from an intermittent year on the campaign trail into a collage of fugitive impressions and vignettes, some poetic and penetrating, others a bit cavalier, and at least a few naively conceited. (Sarkozy and his then wife, Cecilia, attend one of Reza's plays, and Reza reports that, on the plane to a rally, he recites from memory a short "essential" bit of monologue.) Sarkozy introduced Reza as a "genius" to Tony Blair, and invited her to sit in on his first meeting, in Washington, with the then junior senator from Illinois. The concentration of so much political talent and Presidential ambition in one room impressed her, but, on the whole, she found politics a bore--"a dumb job for smart people," as a friend of hers puts it in the book. A journalist warns her that she is out of her depth. "Don't do it, Yasmina," he says. Politicians "are stronger than us." But, she reflects defiantly, "To be threatened by someone's strength, you have to be in competition with him. Or weakened by sentiment."

"The Ballad of Yasmina and Nicolas," as a headline referred to "Dawn, Dusk or Night," does have a model in French letters: the private journals that courtiers of the eighteenth century wrote by candlelight to edify an unworldly child, or to amuse a paramour. Reza's aphoristic style has some of the same elegance. (When the polls show Sarkozy in the lead, she observes, "To be the favorite: how disappointing for a lover of adversity.") Beneath its disenchantment, it also has some of the same yearning for sincerity. As the title suggests, Reza, too, was hiding something from the glare of day. The book is dedicated to a man whom she calls G, and of whom she gives tantalizing but mysterious glimpses. One infers that he is an important politician, perhaps a rival to Sarkozy; that she is courting him with this bravura performance of lese-majeste; and that he eludes and therefore compels her as Sarkozy does not. (After a speech that Sarkozy felt was particularly bold and clever, he asked Reza familiarly, "Ca t'a plu?" --"Were you pleased?" The presumption of the question--that she, "of all people," would be pleased by his self-infatuated rhetoric--insults her.) Yet Sarkozy, she told me, not without admiration, also "understood better than anyone else what I had done." In a way, she conceded, she had betrayed him. It wasn't that she had exposed his vanities--he had signed on for the scrutiny. But he had once chided her, half-jokingly, "You're not here to admire others!" And, without his knowledge, she had spent a uniquely privileged year in his company writing, as she put it, "a chronicle of love" whose true subject was another man. (G's identity has aroused speculation but has never been revealed.)

A talent for ingratitude is often a pre-requisite for great achievement. Few creative artists have the gall of Yasmina Reza, but few have her powers of ...