He called his wife and told her he will be late at the office. She said softly: Can I count on you? Will you be really late? I think that the husband rushed back home then. I remembered this tale as I was following the rumours regarding the love affairs of Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni, although they have not been confirmed...yet. I happen to find these stories to be better than his politics, especially that they are ‘classy', unlike the scandals marring Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire Italian Prime Minister who seems to prefer prostitutes. In my office, I keep political files on leaders such as Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Hosni Mubarak, and Bashar al-Assad, and sex files on Berlusconi and Sarkozy. While the political files are more important, the other files are a better subject for humour and intrigue. Rumours have been haunting Sarkozy since his name first appeared on the French political scene. He was involved in Cecilia's marriage with a television anchor in 1984, and after 12 years, he married her himself. It was a turbulent marriage, as she left him in 2005 to go live with her lover in New York, then came back to him the next year to become the First Lady in 2007. They then got divorced in the same year, and she married Richard Attias, a wealthy Morocco-born events' organizer; at the time, she said that Sarko (his nickname) is obsessed with karate and does not know what love is. Perhaps this statement explains how the President is now being accused of having an affair with a junior minister and karate champion, Chantal Jouanno, and that his wife had begun a relationship with a fellow singer, Benjamin Biolay. In fact, she once said that she finds marital fidelity to be a difficult matter. In 2008, Cecilia accused Sarko of being behind her husband's loss of the contract for organizing the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, which makes me a party in the issue as I have been participating in the Forum for 20 years. In the same year, Sarkozy filed an official complaint against the former French intelligence chief Yves Bertrand, accusing him of spreading rumours concerning his personal life, after Bertrand gathered unconfirmed information that dates back to the period between 1998 and 2003, in small booklets; Le Point Magazine then published some excerpts from the latter. Did Sarko tell Cecilia when she asked for divorce: if you die, you will not find anyone like me? And she replied: if I find someone like you, I will die? I don't know. Perhaps this is yet another rumour, because, objectively speaking, the recent rumours about him and his wife Carla each having an affair were not confirmed, and the couple officially denied it, and threatened to sue those behind these rumours. The name Rachida Dati came in the limelight; she had lost her job as the Minister of Justice last June and was dismissed, as she became marred in her own scandal when she became pregnant and gave birth to a girl without the identity of the father being known. However, she strongly denied [being behind the rumours], and Carla said in a radio interview that Rachida continues to be a friend of the family. I read that love is like measles in that it is more dangerous if one becomes infected with it at a later age: Sarkozy is 55 years old and Cecilia is two years younger, while Attias is younger than both of them and is 51 years old. As for Carla, she turned forty three while Rachida Dati is 45 years old. Ordinary marriage is a partnership, and the husband is usually a silent partner; however, in celebrity marriages, there is always competition over who has the highest voice. In fact, when Cecilia was still the First Lady, she used to advise the President who to choose for official posts and who to expel, while Carla is a liberal who alleviates the right-wing inclinations of her husband. Cecilia also travelled to Libya and saw the HIV-infected children and offered to treat them without consulting her husband the president prior to their divorce; as for Carla, she is a successful model and singer from a wealthy aristocratic Italian family, unlike Sarkozy, who is the son of two refugees from Eastern Europe (although I once thought that he is of Qatari origins given his passion in conducting political mediation). The French have always been more successful in sex than in politics or war; if there was no sex scandal they would make up one. For instance, Marie Antoinette was wrongly accused of having illicit sexual relations, while Claude Pompidou was accused of taking part in orgies before she married President George Pompidou, but the accusations turned out to be completely false. In addition, President Chirac was rumoured to have an illegitimate child with a Japanese woman, but this was never confirmed; also, President Mitterrand denied having an illegitimate daughter for years, but then admitted in 1984 that Mazarine is his daughter. At any rate, it seems that what matters in sex scandals is not the truth, but rather, for the details to be interesting even if they are false. What is more important, however, is for me and the reader to remain readers of such news and not their perpetrators. Having desire is meaningless if there is no ability to carry it out, and the husband will soon discover that it is bad luck if his wife leaves him, but it is even worse luck if she doesn't. [email protected]
