Charles Bremner's blog: why French media stayed silent

France already knew that it was love at first sight for Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni.

Today the country was treated to the full throbbing script of the instant romance between the President known as Speedy and the supermodel singer with a reputation as a man-eater.

True to his impulsive form, the bedazzled President offered marriage on the night that he met the Italian-born Ms Bruni at a dinner party, according to an eyewitness account published today. He dared her to kiss him on the lips and said that she would be Marilyn Monroe to his JFK.

The freshly divorced President also claimed to be her romantic and sexual soul mate and jealously mocked the legs of Mick Jagger, one of her former lovers. The fly-on-the-wall tale of the future first couple's high-octane mating rituals came from Jacques Séguéla, the friend who invited them on a blind date to his home on November 13, 2007. They married seven weeks later.

Mr Séguéla, 75, a star of the French advertising world and friend of both, took notes of the coup de foudre and published them this week in Autobiographie non autorisée.

Mr Sarkozy, 54, more than lives up to his whirlwind nickname in Mr Séguéla's story of the “unexpected game of seduction between two wild beasts” that played out before the eyes of his bemused other guests.

The President, playing the field after Cécilia, his previous wife, had walked out a month earlier, asked Mr Séguéla to organise the meeting. He turned up late and without a tie. He was attracted “like a magnet” to Ms Bruni, then turning 40, and threw himself at her, playfully. Behaving like “the huntress Diana with velvet claws”, Ms Bruni toyed with the over-eager President and, using the informal tu, warned him that she knew of his reputation as a womaniser.

“My reputation is no worse than yours,” he told her. “I know you well without ever meeting you. I understand everything about you ... You make love because no one makes love to you. I know everything about you because I am so much you.”

With a hush around the table, Mr Sarkozy promised to be in the front row of a forthcoming Bruni concert. “We will announce our engagement. You will see, we will do better than Marilyn and Kennedy,” he told her.

She replied: “Engagement, never! From now on I will only live with a man who gives me a child.” Mr Sarkozy came back: “I have already brought up five. Why not six?”

The President leant over and whispered in Ms Bruni's ear: “Bet you don't have the nerve right now in front of everyone to kiss me on the mouth.” She did not reply. He then invited her to spend Christmas with him in Egypt. She refused.

The couple, whom Mr Séguéla describes as Shakespearean, left together and the presidential car dropped Ms Bruni off at her home after she had given him her telephone number. Ms Bruni telephoned her host ten minutes later and complained: “Your chum - what charm, what intelligence, what attention, what energy, what seductiveness. But I find him a bit of a boor. I left him my number and he still hasn't called.” Mr Séguéla describes the pair as made for one another despite Ms Bruni's reputation as a predator and her initial disdain for the President.

Mr Sarkozy warned Ms Bruni that going out with him would not be easy as he was followed by paparazzi. She sniffed: “When it comes to the celebrity press, you are an amateur. My encounter with Mick [Jagger] stayed secret for eight years. We passed through all the capitals of the world and no photographer ever caught us.”

Ms Bruni explained that she disguised the Rolling Stones frontman, then married to Jerry Hall, with false beards and odd hairstyles. The mention of Jagger stung Mr Sarkozy, said Mr Séguéla. He riposted: “How could you have stayed eight years with a man who has such ridiculous calves?”

Mr Séguéla said he concluded straight away that Ms Bruni was interested in the President because she wore flat-soled pumps, a practice that she has since adopted to avoid towering over her shorter husband.

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