POSTCARD #1

 

Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni's Secret Wedding!

OMG BGF FLF! as I said in the text message that I sent to many of you late last night. And I still can't believe it. As of 7 p.m. yesterday, Carla Bruni, my best girlfriend ever since we met at the age of twelve at L'Etourneau boarding school in Switzerland, where we shared tears, laughter, phenylcyclohexylpiperidine and lymphogranuloma, is now the First Lady of France. Yes, the Carla Bruni: former model, singer-songwriter and muse to the rich and famous, actually married my old and dear friend President Nicolas Sarkozy in a secret ceremony here at my home in the rue de Varenne. Carla and I are proud to call each other best friends: we're both beautiful, talented, well-educated and chic, but above all we care deeply about each other. Carla helps me to feel better about myself and I try to help Carla to be less of a whore. FULL STORY

 

POSTCARD #2

 

Bonjour, mes chéries! You won't believe it. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and I were having our claws sharpened two weeks ago at Carita-—there's nothing like a mani-pedi with your BGF to make you relax, I mean other than a Top of the Pops mix of monoamine oxidase inhibitors in a bottle of perfectly chilled Taittinger brut rosé prestige, of course—when she turned to me and said "Loulou darling, I have wonderful news. Nicolas told me that I'm pregnant!"

 

I let out a little squeal and said "A baby in the Elysée palace!" This, I told Carla, is going to be like that magical time of Camelot that all of us here in France remember from the adorable images of little John-John Kennedy peeking out from beneath the skirt of Marilyn Monroe in the Oval Office while his mother sat out on the Truman Balcony getting hammered and it made me nostalgic for those first days of autumn in Paris each year when we would send the children off to school with their new book satchels and crayons and cigarettes. How I miss hearing them ask all of those precious, unanswerable questions that delight mothers everywhere: "Maman, what does God look like?" and "Maman, what's the difference between a president and a rich thug with bodyguards?"and "Maman, where does the sun go sleepy-bye?" and "Maman, what's the difference between a church leader and a corporate shill for the pedophile industry?" So sweet! FULL STORY

 

POSTCARD #3

 

Springtime in Paris. The daffodils, roses, magnolias and linden trees simply bursting with heavenly colours and smells make April in Paris so perfect that not even an attentive and loving husband could ruin it. It reminds me of the first enchanted spring days of my childhood at La Paumardiere, when I used to watch my father caring for the horses, rams and bulls, and I'd hop up and down like a little bunny and beg "Papa, please let me use the emasculator." And it has been a stellar time for France, with victories at home-Nicolas' triumph over a creepy foreign enemy at the National Livestock Show (Foreign Enemy: "Don't touch me, you soil me when you do." Nicolas, ever the grand statesman: "So get lost, mother f%cker." (www.youtube.com/watch)-and abroad: after conquering America with an Oscar, we conquered England with a brilliant visit in late March, and I haven't felt such a bounce in my step since last year's fashion week in Paris when I saw American Vogue editor Anna Wintour's ten-foot black pashmina get caught under the revolving door at the Ritz and watched her being dragged around repeatedly to bloodied unconsciousness before finally being spewed out onto the place Vendôme during the garbage strike and I rushed to her and said "Why bangs?"

 

FULL STORY

 

POSTCARD #4

 

Summer's here, darlings, and although President Bush was in Paris on Friday June 13 and the Eiffel Tower fell over on its side and the entire city burned to the ground, the usual events of the season are well under way. After Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, Madonna and Bruce Willis, the greatest of all artists, Kylie Minogue, recently received a French knighthood from a grateful nation (http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23652420-5013438,00.html link) (there is talk of a Nobel prize in 2009), the ceremony coinciding with the annual anti-leptospirosis parade in Paris-leptospirosis being the disease carried by our eight million Parisian rats-and with the highly decorative pile of dead rats and mice some supermarket employees made on the pavement outside their store in protest against the city's losing battle against the lethal bacteria caddies http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Rats-love-Paris-in-the.4044192.jp. France also lost at the French Open (where I wore a darling little short-sleeved khaki safari dress with epaulettes, gold and tortoise shell bracelets and rings, a coffee-coloured crocodile belt and matching Christian Louboutin shoes whose red soles provided the only dash of colour).

 

FULL STORY

 

POSTCARD #5

 

Having grown fangs and a marsupial pouch during the night, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy awoke, and now she sat grooming in front of the giant termite mound that had sprung up in the middle of the presidential bedroom. She looked at Nicolas, her beloved husband, and screeched “Jabbajabbahabba?”

 

He opened his eyes, replied “Habbahabbajabba!” and leapt naked out of bed. Dragging his long reptilian tail, the president lurched towards the mound, where his wife squatted patiently with her back turned to him. Unperturbed by the patches of ringworm and dry rot, Nicolas began to pluck the lice from the First Lady’s back and devour them.

 

FULL STORY

 

 

POSTCARD #6

 

I opened the book, only it wasn't a book. It was an ancient-looking, sculpted silver, book-shaped strong-box with a ruby, sapphire and diamond cabochon on top and a gold padlock. The calligraphic note said that I could have the key if I'd come to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on Christmas Eve.

 

I vaulted back upstairs and realized that I must have been transfixed by the note much longer than I'd thought because Carla had had time to prepare her various beauty treatments for the night and was now sitting up in bed with bull semen in her supposedly damaged hair, nightingale droppings and Japanese rice bran on her face (the Geisha facial ), the nightly $800 jar of moisturizing cream spread evenly over her body, and leeches working merrily away on her neck, breasts and stomach for her weekly detoxification. We had planned to go for one of those fish pedicures the next day (Carla said "They must need a microscope to see the fishies' little toes!"), but the tiny Garra rufa fish who nibble away at dead skin on your feet at Carita had all mysteriously died after a disgruntled former pedicure girl who'd been transferred to shampoos had given them a perm. FULL STORY

 

POSTCARD #7

 

I swore I would not do this. Nevertheless, I push the shutters open and look out onto the rolling lawn and the three hundred-year-old trees of La Paumardiere as the Eurocopter EC 135 sets down and starts up Christmas Eve.

 

A few minutes later, as we fly over the forests and woods of southern Normandy and the Yvelines, heading towards Versailles, I stretch out in the sleek, spartan Hermes interior, I'm wearing the black Chanel patent and suede stilettos and black tights with little red and green king Charles cavaliers on them (my design, made by John Galliano's little fairy-fingered seamstresses in one of his sweatshops), a bit corny I know but I find them darling and have never met a woman who didn't drop dead for them; men don't care, so long as they come off, and I start thinking about how I know next to nothing about this American and I'm so trying not to panic or jump to conclusions the way Carla did that time we were having a very late lunch at L'Arpege a few doors down from my house in Paris and she was wearing the cutest little sleeveless black cashmere turtleneck dress and I had on the gold silk sleeveless cocktail dress with the wide, rounded A-line skirt intersected with a black velvet half-moon at the midriff and all of a sudden she whispered frantically "Oh my God, Loulou, don't turn around. At the table right behind us: Arab terrorists wearing those towel things with the big black silk napkin rings on top of their heads and they're carrying rifles!" And I swiveled and saw a vase of lilies and some breadsticks and told her to put her contacts in and she was like "My bad." FULL STORY

 

 

 

 

About LOUISE DE LA PAUMARDIERE It would be difficult to imagine anyone more purely French or a better embodiment of France and French values than polyglamorous Louise de la Paumardiere. Loulou's paternal great grandfather Andre Le Troquer, unfairly removed from office as President of the French Senate in 1958 for having run a pedophile network, and her maternal grandfather General Paul Ausseresses, unfairly stripped of his rank and thrown out of the Legion d'Honneur because of his role as a torturer in the Franco-Algerian war, are but two of her many famous ancestors. Author of From Foreign to French: 100 Makeovers in Stories and Pictures (New York and London: PLB Books, 2006), multi-talented and multilingual Loulou de la Paumardiere first came to public attention when several of the high-profile Paris-based foreign women on whom she performed makeovers committed suicide. Her family operates the majority of the uniquely French institutions known as Centres d'aide par le travail, or CATS, factories in which handicapped French citizens are employed at less than minimum wage because, as Loulou puts it with her typical Cartesian clarity, "they are handicapped." Her ancestral home, Château de la Paumardiere in Boilly-sur-Gui, an hour from Paris in Normandy, has hosted every head of state since Louis XIV and was a favorite haunt of Lully the Sodomite. She continues that great tradition of French hospitality on weekends in Boilly and during the week at her luxurious mansion at 60, rue de Varenne in Paris.