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!

 

Carla so wants to be not only a good mother but a good stepmother and has questioned my three eldest sons, who have been arrested and immediately released with the Sarkozy boys so many times that they are like brothers, about how to proceed. "Oh, Loulou," she said just the other day, "it's been a month since the wedding! When, oh when, will Nicolas' children finally accept me?"

 

"What makes you think that they don't, darling?"

 

And she said "I was having one of my cravings last night and was alone in the Elysée kitchen when one of Nicolas' sons suddenly appeared in the kitchen doorway."

 

"Which one?" I asked. "The one who looks like Trini Lopez in a Baby Jane wig, or the ugly one?"

 

"Trini," said Carla. "I hadn't been able to find my bathrobe when I got out of bed and wasn't really expecting to see anyone, so when I heard footsteps I quickly grabbed the first thing I could find and covered myself up. And so he walks in and goes, 'Nice spatula,' and I said "Oh hi. Thanks," quickly readjusting it to cover as much of my solar plexus as possible. "Would you like a glass of milk or to clip some jumper cables to my nipples or a cookie or anything?" And he was like, 'No, I'm good,' and just walked out.

 

And I looked at her and said "Carla, honestly, sometimes you can be such a cephalopod."

 

And then right there in Carita she lifted her blouse and showed me a small Rubelli pillow belted onto her stomach. "This is what Nicolas told me is referred to as an 'alternative pregnancy,'" she said. "He doesn't want me to be pregnant for real because he says it's 'just too yucky' and he asked his mother if it would be okay and she said absolutely not. Still, Nicolas says politics is merely a way of getting the masses worked up before using them for ones own purposes and this alt-pregnancy makes the President look less like a pelvis-led nincompoop and more like a paterfamilias the nation's fools can actually trust, and then he tried to explain something he called 'leveraging the brand.'"

 

Well, this was certainly unexpected, but not really in a good way like when that one bad cop asks another for a light and Robocop shows up and says "Allow me, scum," and torches them with his flamethrower. Carla told me that when Nicolas broke the news to her about it not being a real baby and all, she felt so lonely that at one point she had tried to take her life by ingesting a 290-calorie meal at one sitting, but half way through, just as her soul was about to leave her body, her cell phone had rung and she asked for the check. The next day, she got into a hot bath with the intention of slitting her wrists, but, realizing she had forgotten the razor, stepped out onto a wet bar of soap and executed something ice skaters would have recognized as a triple Lutz-single back flip, fracturing her coccyx as she landed on the scalding tub faucet before rocketing vertically into the mirror and ricocheting down onto the bidet, where she cracked her head with a chilling, osteopathic bong.

 

As her best friend, I tried to comfort her and I hugged her and said "Carla darling, it's normal for you to be suicidal: you're not even French. To Nicolas, this national interest pregnancy is just another run of the mill state-organized scientific swindle. For him, facts, as maman always liked to say, are like fidelity or virginity: a state of mind. But you, Carla darling, you're a woman."

 

"I am?" she said.

 

"Bear with me. And you've had the cruelest of all tricks played on you by these bastards."

 

"Oh, Loulou, I didn't care about the baby," said Carla. "I just wanted to have breasts the size of Aepyornis eggs for a couple of years."

 

"Well, you're sure you're not going to do anything foolish?" I asked.

 

She nodded.

 

"All right then, darling," I said as I pushed a small, abalone-handled .38 into her hand. "But I'm leaving this loaded gun with you just in case."

 

"Loulou, you're the bestest. But I just feel so used."

 

"Not used, Carla: vintage. And think about it: wouldn't you rather have an alt-pregnancy with bigger and bigger pillows rather than the real thing? Or have you forgotten that giving birth is like trying to push a Smart car with a life-size accordion player hood ornament through a keyhole, although, to be sure, nothing that Epidural, nitrous oxide and a heart-shaped box of Mommy's First Opiate Sampler can't dull? But I do know how you feel. Children are God's gift to women so that we may help our childless friends pass imperceptibly from a vague feeling of uneasiness to clinical depression. Looks and talent and chateaux and travel and Aston-Martins and Kelly bags are nice, but for a sheer sense of empowerment give me a strollerful of cruelty, any day. Carla darling, you're the First Lady now, so you must do this for France."

 

"At least," she said, "Nicolas let me choose whether to call the pillow a boy or a girl, so I said girl."

 

"Oh Carla darling, just think of the fun you'll have imagining dressing her up. And there's no greater satisfaction than teaching a little girl to be not just a woman, but a Frenchwoman. Forget teaching her to play goddamn Für Elise on the piano the way mothers in other countries do. We'll teach her instead how to attain a level of cattier than thouness that not even an ex-trailer trash gay male force-fed Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward by a fashionista coven could dream of; how to make a vinaigrette; to always wear her WWMJW ("What Would Mrs. Jesus Wear?) ring" (for starters, obviously, the Little Black Dress); how to get by her entire life as a Parisienne with a single quotation (General de Gaulle on the right number of dinner guests: "more than the Graces, fewer than the Muses," accompanied by the four-little-puffs-exhaled-from-the-nostrils laugh); how to ignore poor-looking children whose parents sometimes manage to find the what I used to believe were well-concealed sandboxes at the back of the Rodin museum garden; how to do the Daddy's little girl thing in bed until she's too old to talk (men!); how to spot FFPs (foreigners with French potential) including, if rarely, Americans, like Jerry Lewis, the greatest actor of all time, whose routines imitating cerebral palsy victims launched his brilliant career, or that darling little girl Taylor on Kid Nation, who chirped that ugly animals should all be killed and only the beautiful ones allowed to live.

 

"And teaching her, above all, that size matters." For doesn't the greatest book of all time, The Da Vinci Code, prove scientifically that if Christ were alive today he would be a young French female aristocrat and that she would be deliciously thin? Carla knows that I was obliged, although it broke my heart, to give up one of my daughters, I believe her name was Aliénor, for adoption when she was only five years old, because she was going to have slightly thickish ankles the rest of her life and the doctor told me that it was inoperable. She also loved gladiolas, the Teletubbies and that garish hellhole they call home and, when we lost a dozen hounds who were kicked to death by the horses while we were hunting at La Paumardiere one October, gave herself up to a revolting display of sentimentality (a girl who says 'poor wittle beagles' over some hounds will marry a man who will say 'poor wittle immigwants,' and they will breed similar weaklings in turn); her fate was sealed.

 

Nicolas, who is Franco-Hungarian, and Carla, who is of course Italian, agree that they want the new baby to be in the image of the new France, at once modern and mixed, less Franco-French and more European. We all loved the Chiracs, but they were so franco-français that even the official French presidential web site referred to them as "about half a gamete away from Dueling Banjos," and they were certainly anything but modern. The French government wasn't even convinced of the necessity of having computers until a tragic 1998 incident that resulted in President Chirac having to spend two weeks in an ICU after he got his tongue caught in a Rolodex and, panic-stricken, foolishly tried to yodel for help. But Carla and Nicolas are already even thinking about names for the baby that won't be too French-sounding. If it's a boy, Carla told Nicolas that she's always liked Coyolxauhqui and Huitzilopochtli, and for a girl, she thinks Centzonhuitznahuac is really cute, but Nicolas looked at her with what his psychiatrist calls a humorless catatonic grin, and Carla goes "Kevin and Tiffany it is." Carla, who turned 39 in 2002, brings a long-overdue freshness and vivacity to the staid decorum of the presidential palace, even if arch-conservative voices could be heard carping as usual about her flawless style when last Friday, to welcome Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt to the Elysée Palace, she appeared at Nicolas’ side wearing only rollerblades and an iPod Nano.

 

To think that it's been less than a month since the wedding and one week ago today I hosted the baby shower here at 60, rue de Varenne. It was so beautiful to see Carla sitting among the mountains of FuzziBunz onesies and Dr. Cindy's Ritalin Kid's Kakes, and then of course there were the presents for the baby. As black is the new pink, and pastels on babies in this neighborhood would look as hip as Mamie Eisenhower gabbing into Gordon Gekko's cell phone, Carla was thrilled to get the most exquisite little ninja-black cashmere Sonia Rykiel outfits for newborns, including an adorable hoodie and matching booties with 9-inch spiky heelies, and the black playpen sent over by John Galliano with bamboo and oak branches and live, tie-dyed cockatoos and huge condors and a real pirate inside. And Carla's friend Christine Lagarde, Nicolas' minister of finance, came and brought a Diaper Cake, but when she came into the room, all of the other young women gasped and shrieked and were sore afraid because Christine's hair can be just insane. But this angered Christine and now she could only be fed with human blood and so they built a pyramid and sacrificed 20,000 people over a four-day period and Christine stood at the top of the pyramid drinking their blood out of a goblet made from SocGen trader Jerome Kerviel's skull. Then she woke up. Tomorrow there will be a darling double-page colour photo spread in Paris Match showing Carla and Nicolas cutting the Diaper cake and feeding each other mouthfuls of wood pulp and super absorbent polyacrylate.

 

Former First Lady Cecilia Ciganer-Albéniz was obviously not invited to the shower, but I think you all should know that Cecilia is both a mother, and, like Carla and Nicolas, a practicing Catholic, and that she sent not one but two presents. For the baby, a beautiful bright blue book for the child to be able to read and cherish in years to come: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, with dozens of precisely-described lunatic traits highlighted in pink throughout the book and little arrows pointing neatly to the words Remind you of anyone? (rhymes with smother) in the margins. And for Carla, a giant (six foot-wide!) Indonesian Rafflesia flower, also known by the beautiful names "corpse flower" or "meat flower," because it smells like rotting meat, with which Cecilia included a charming note: "Dearest Carla: This flower is a parasite and has no true roots: use it as a mirror, you filthy bitch. Yours in Christ, Cecilia." I know that Cecilia would be gratified to know that her gifts moved Carla to tears.

 

Carla's justified feelings of victimization over the pregnancy have yielded to thinking aloud about its viability as a con game. "The French won't be fooled," she said. "I mean, they're so Cartesian." Nicolas and I agree that the thing we love most about Carla is her touching naïveté.

 

"Cartesian, my cute little French ass," I shot back. "Over 1,500 people per year ask for exorcisms in the Paris diocese alone. This will be a cinch." I turned to Nicolas and said "Nicolas, tell her that it will be a cinch."

 

"Oh my God, a cinch!" said Nicolas. "We may market France as Cartesian and liberal, but Scientologists, Tennessee snake handlers and the people buying monkey skulls to place under the pillows of their hallucinating children in Uttar Pradesh are more Cartesian and more liberal than we will ever be! No matter! France can say that a miracle spared her from the Chernobyl cloud and vaunt a 2007 Paris Court of Appeal decision confirming that France officially believes it to be dangerous-listen to me, Carla, I'm not making this up-for children to be bilingual and making it illegal for foreign kids to be enrolled in French bilingual schools, and no one will laugh because we have so many different kinds of cheese!

 

"Remember when Hermes barred that apparently famous American woman, Oprah something, from entering their flagship store, and how, after having said she thought that there was something maybe sort of racist about the fact that the manager and the two salesmen came out wearing white silk Hermes hoods over their heads and attached her to a burning cross on wheels and sent her caroming down the rue du faubourg St. Honoré, she went right back to America and described it as an isolated incident that bore no trace of racism and gave the CEO of Hermes a hug on national television and forgave France and thanked us for being the land of romance and truth and human whatevers?" asked Nicolas, laughing his Richard Widmark when he pushes the old lady in the wheelchair down the stairs in Kiss of Death laugh. "Carla, no matter what we do or say, the reputation of France is bullet-proof." Carla and I agree that the three things that Nicolas loves most are conniving, in that order.

 

Carla's eyes were watering up. "Carla, darling, why are you crying?" asked Nicolas.

 

"Because," she said, "you used some numbers and they make my face hurt."

 

This was perfectly timed, however, as Nicolas hadn't seen a female cry all morning and it was almost noon, but to make a long story short, Carla agreed to go along with the scam. Carla knows that Nicolas will provide her with the finest reality manipulators money can buy, and that the Sarkozy cabinet has no intellectual equivalent in the rest of the world, with the possible exception of the Gambino family. She told me she actually feels honoured because Nicolas would only have chosen her to take part in an official swindle and cover-up if he considered her to be the equal of modern France's other great female cover uppers from Simone Veil to Rachida Dati.

 

And she's not wrong. Nicolas told me that when he looks at the photo of Carla that graces the presidential desk-an exquisite Helmut Newton nude with Carla surrounded by hundreds of mice in the middle of their synchronized swimming routine-it is her intellect and her engagement that he admires. "How not to hear," asked Nicolas in a speech just last week, "an echo of the incisive female esprit heard in the famous French salons of Madame de Rambouillet, Madeleine de Scudery or Julie de Lespinasse in my beautiful wife's laughing, and frequent, 'I dunno'?" Nicolas admires the fact that Carla has strong opinions, notably about the evils of capitalism for non-billionaire tire industry heiresses, and that she is an ardent supporter of women's rights for her closest friends. "When the Saudi government told Nicolas shortly before our marriage at Loulou's house last month," Carla recently said in an interview with L'Express, "that he could not bring along his fiancée, I went to Saudi Arabia nevertheless, and I agree with Nicolas that my contribution to women's rights was not diminished in the least by the fact that I had to spend the entire three days in the trunk of the car." Such is Nicolas' respect for Carla's sheer intelligence that all French fourth-graders now have to learn by heart Carla's first speech, given in Paris on February 10, 2008, and it is thrilling to hear a classroom full of those little French voices reciting the now famous opening line: "I believe in liberty, equality and silky smooth hair for everyone, irregardless of if they are dark-skinned or anything icky like that."

 

Nicolas has justified Carla's sitting in occasionally on cabinet meetings by pointing out that if someone as intelligent as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy cannot understand discussions among the ministers (all too often mere displays, says Nicolas, of intellectual one-upmanship) then ordinary French people will never comprehend his government's policies. This has now resulted in major changes, and where one once heard a budget minister droning on about saddle-node bifurcation and type-I intermittency in non-linear economic cycles, or a "non-attracting chaotic set" (the latter phrase angered Nicolas, who loathes talking about his private life), all of France's ministers are now required to make presentations during cabinet meetings using only sock puppets and an Etch-a-Sketch.

 

Just as sincerely as Nicolas admires Carla's IQ, Carla couldn't care less about anything as shallow as looks. And why should she? Her own divine good looks--as her best girlfriend, I felt that it was my responsibility to tell her, so that she wouldn't give it a second thought, about the cruel faux riddle going around Paris about how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if he hadn't sold his fucking cheeks to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy-have meant that she's known, and with the most beautiful men in the world, varieties of physical intimacy of which most of us women can only dream, like that time when their luggage stayed on the helicopter in Banff and Mr. Trump, as she was still calling him then, had no comb or hairspray and Carla gave him a lick-over.

 

No, it is not Nicolas' looks that first attracted Carla to him (she told me the night she met him here in the rue de Varenne that if Nicolas were to change his hair, he could be a devastatingly handsome camel). Rather, the attraction he exerts on her is dual. First, Carla and I both like what is called "a man's man," and Nicolas certainly fits the bill. Even though, and this is absolutely confidential, he's not afraid to show chinks in the manly armour, or even to cry, or even to shriek at the top of his lungs as he did when one of the cleaning crew suddenly came around a corner one night with a vacuum cleaner roaring over one of the Aubusson rugs and Nicolas jumped into Carla's arms with a shrill Make it stop!, he has shown on innumerable occasions that he can be merciless with helpless poor people when the situation so requires. Nor does Nicolas fear the daunting, rough and tumble world of litigation: he is currently suing an English tabloid, The Daily Mirror, for having published the infamous photo of him standing on the beach in Positano wearing only a pair of those big red wax lips and a hat made out of a roulette wheel. Nonetheless, it came as quite a surprise to Carla that Nicolas can actually be physically tough as well, and she told me how she had watched in admiration only a few days ago as Nicolas personally helped officers at an eighth precinct police station kick to death a dangerous Moroccan immigrant who was being held on suspicion of skipping up and down the Champs-Elysées.

 

So Nicolas is indeed tough, and tough indeed, but I knew that Carla was above all impressed with Nicolas' steel trap of a mind and, yes, his Machiavellianism, when we were lying on the beach last Christmas Eve in St. Tropez, where we'd decided to spend the holidays together in a tiny, thirty-room Presidential hideaway. Carla and Nicolas had picked me up at the Nice airport and we'd gone straight to the beach and I simply took off my rags-a black sheer lace bra from La Perla and black patterned Dim tights under a black bouclé Chanel suit with black and silver Prada running-away-from-parenting shoes-and threw them on the sand; Carla, who during the entire holiday wore only, if memory serves, a sponge, lay between Nicolas and me, and we were just watching the clouds float by when Nicolas suddenly said: "Let's burp the Marseillaise."

 

And Carla goes "Real mature, Nicolas."

 

And he said "More mature than you'll ever be."

 

And she said "Are not."

 

"Am too."

 

"Are not."

 

"Am too."

 

"Are not."

 

"Am too."

 

"Are not."

 

"Am too more than however many times you can ever say 'are not;' I quit," said Nicolas.

 

Carla lay there, stunned at Nicolas' superior debating abilities. She looked over at me, lifted her sunglasses and mouthed: "He's good."

 

And when Gaddafi was here and we made him that tent and Nicolas came out and said Muammar and I had frank and useful discussions about human rights, Carla realized what a good lawyer Nicolas is, but then she realized, as she said, that Muammar is a better one when Muammar said "No, we didn't, but we should, talk about the scandals of the chevalier de la Barre, captain Dreyfus, the Yonne disappearances and the Lindsay-Bowles affair, or the fact that France has had more anti-Semitic incidents in the past ten years than all other European countries combined, or let's talk, shall we, dear Nicolas, about your law that says that once a bad girl has served, say, a twenty-year prison sentence, three judges can get together and decide that if she is still unremorseful about being, say, non-French, they can keep her longer, just for the fun of it." And that's when Carla said she got to see up close the sort of rapier repartee that had put Nicolas in the Elysée in the first place, as he knocked the stuffing out of Muammar Gaddafi with his now classic "Ssshhhhh! Okay, okay!"

 

Even Rama Yade, our minister for human rights, who initially objected to the Gaddafi visit, was so inspired by Nicolas' courageous performance that she did an about-face. "President Sarkozy is like a father to me," said she. "He doesn't just talk about loyalty; he lives it: how many men do you know who would have kept a Captain and Tennille 4 Ever tattoo on their ass all these years? So anyway, if I had known that Mr. Gaddafi was here to sign €10 billion in contracts for French-made anti-Zionist nuclear facilities in Libya, I would have totally gone Dude. I apologized for not having understood and President Sarkozy thanked me and palpated my breasts and reminded me that God loves each and every one of us precisely because we are all whores."

 

Speaking of whom-of God and his love, that is-Carla told me that, even though she's virtually pregnant, she's still a woman, and intends to live her life to the full and has already slept with the American who lives downstairs, the very same man who always calls the police on us (in vain, obviously) when we throw champagne bottles off the roof, and is, according to Carla, quite a big fan of "President Sarkozee."

 

I said "Carla, really, are we talking about the same man? Tall, not very bright-looking, gobs of money and zero taste and culture?"

 

"That's the one."

 

And I was with her when, quite against my advice, she told Nicolas about her night away from the Elysée palace. After breaking that horrid Houdon bust of a toothless Voltaire against the marble floor, Nicolas looked at Carla with his big brown Doberman eyes and asked with great dignity: "Why, Carla? Why?"

 

And Carla looked at him without smiling and said: "Because I am in love."

 

Well, I hadn't seen Nicolas this angry since the time we were out on Silvio Berlusconi's boat in the Adriatic and Nicolas dove off and when he climbed back up the ladder he was trembling and very angry because an octopus had latched onto his face and Nicolas could hear all of us laughing and his voice had somehow shape-shifted into this incredible hysterical male falsetto saying Hpmi! Hpmi! Smbdi hpmi! and then he grabbed the octopus with both hands and lifted it over his head but it clung to his face with its horrid sucker things they have and was, Nicolas said later, sort of French kissing him with something called-—this gives me the willies just saying it—its radula, until finally it popped off with this loud wet sucking sound and Nicolas threw it down onto the deck to kill it but on the way down it clamped on to his crotch with another loud wet slurping sound and Nicolas dove back into the water to see if he could lose it and he totally lost it, the octopus I mean, and someone shouted "Spineless, but smart," and poor Nicolas wasn't sure if they meant the octopus or him and when he came back up I said it's all right to cry, that's good that's right just let it all out.

 

Still I knew with absolute certainty that this baby thing would come off without a hitch when I heard Carla complete her answer: "Silly Nicolas, why did I sleep with the American? For the same reason that I slept with the Prime Minister, with your chief of staff, with your minister of foreign affairs and with the president of the Senate. I slept with him, my darling Nicolas, because I am in love with his loyalty to you."

 

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© 2008 Louise de la Paumardiere

 

 

 

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.