Paris Match.(France's first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy)

Byline: Photographed by Jonathan Becker

Singer, model, freethinker Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has become an ideal first lady. The newly French beauty discusses power, image, and poetry with Joan Juliet Buck.

I loved them until they loved me," sang Carla Bruni in her 2007 adaptation of the Dorothy Parker poem "Ballade at Thirty-five," but now that she's the first lady of France, love is for keeps. She met Nicolas Sarkozy in November 2007 and married him just over a year ago. Never before has a president's wife brought beauty, brains, talent, culture, style, a fortune of her own, an illegitimate son, a racy past, and nude pictures to the table.

"My husband may represent amoderateright-wing party, but in no way is he a conservative," she says. "If he were, he wouldn't have married me. He's a big change for Francehe's Jewish, Hungarian, Greek, and he won the popular vote in a country where people like their leaders to be called de Gaulle."

She herself will no longer be Italian when her official request for French nationality has inched its way through the bureaucracy, which should be soon. For a year, the president's wife traveled on a temporary passport.

"What have you learned in your first year as first lady?" I ask.

It's a bitterly cold afternoon in Paris. Israel is pounding Gaza; Putin has cut off the natural gas to Ukraine, which responded by cutting off natural gas to Europe; every stock market has tanked; credit markets all over the world have frozen; Obama has not yet been sworn in. In a handsome Art Deco house that she has rented for the last five years in a cul-de-sac in a quiet part of Paris, Carla Bruni lights a log fire with a switchat least the gas is still coming through. Outside the French windows, snow tops the boxwoods and lies on the ground. A rolling oil-filled radiator stands at the ready against drafts.