Love And Politics.(The Talk of the Town)

Earlier this month, France was disrupted by the image of a woman both sexually alive and politically relevant--defiant and proud and threatening. And while that was going on the President of the country was canoodling with a former model. The picture in question was a photograph, published on the cover of Le Nouvel Observateur, the center-left newsweekly, of Simone de Beauvoir, philosopher and feminist, seen tout ensemble, and from the rear. It's quite a photograph. (It's quite a rear.) The picture was taken, in 1950, by, of all people, an American--the photographer Art Shay--in, of all places, Chicago, where Beauvoir was canoodling bilingually with Nelson Algren. That news seemed to clinch the picture's meaning as part of Beauvoir's mystique (just as the reverse mystique for Henry Miller was that all of his bilingual canoodling with Anais Nin took place in Clichy): this is the kind of thing that happens to a Frenchwoman in Chicago when her boyfriend is a blue-collar writer and everyone drinks bourbon and leaves the bathroom door open.

Which leads us, inevitably, to President Nicolas Sarkozy and his sweetheart, the possibly soon to be (or possibly already) Mme. Sarkozy, Carla Bruni. The Italian model and singer, who has been around several blocks, many of them touristique, in her career--Mick Jagger and Donald Trump have both been mentioned--took up with the new President last fall, and was photographed with him at Disneyland Paris and Luxor, among other places.

The Oo-La-La! division of the Mon Dieu! school of the American press has portrayed the bizarre story of this courtship, which came so soon after Sarkozy's very public divorce from Cecilia, the mother of one of his three children, as typically French. (Zey are a funny race.) The French press, by contrast, has seen in the story something so obviously second-rate and vulgar that it must be in some way American. The tone in the upper reaches of the French press has been not "We have a right to know!" but "Do we really have to cover this crap?" The Olympian Le Monde omitted any reference to the President and his woman from at least one front page last week, while the rest of the press has struggled, with subtle semiotic hints, to place it linguistically in the right geography: L'Express, in its cover story on the pair, called Sarkozy "Le President 'People' " (with the word "people" in English, so that nobody would miss the point), and a number of other journals have taken to calling him the Bling-Bling President, a name meant to take in his taste not only for former models but for yachts and showy restaurants as well. (The "bling-bling" device has become so popular that a debate has broken out over who was the first to use it.)

What distinguishes the ballad of Carla and Nicolas from similar tales is that this time the media is not trying to pry into the private life of a public man; this time, a public man is trying desperately to parade his ...