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.

 

I showed her the silver box and the note and Carla giggled and said "Isn't it romantic? He's rented the entire chateau for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and I believe the 26th."

 

And I said "Creepy and nauseating, yes; romantic, no. I mean if he knew me or if we were even on a first name basis-what is his name again, by the way?"

 

"Patrick," said Carla.

 

"Well, if this Patrick knew me as well as you claim he does, then he'd know not to play silly games like this."

 

"But Loulou, ma cherie, it's not a silly game. I asked him how serious he was about getting to be with you for a day or two, and he looked at me and said "Carla, for me, this is the foundation of Rome."

 

"Good thing it doesn't make him sound even more like a psychopath!" I said. "And, by the way, who decided that this little get together was actually going to happen?"

 

"Oh, Loulou, you must go. I promised him you would."

 

"Then you can just unpromise right now. Carla, use your head! I don't care in the slightest for all of this childish mystery and certainly don't want to discover that he's actually Colonel Mustard or something once it's too late. Why doesn't he simply call me if he wants to ask me out so that I can say no viva voce?"

 

"But Loulou, he doesn't need to speak to you. He wants to be with you."

 

"Well, darling, you know I'm always a bit skeptical of the sepulchral, silent type, especially when no one seems to know anything about him except that he's quiet but just really nice and polite, which is what the neighbours always say about the crazed loner who lives next door in his mother's basement once he's been carted away and they dig up the floorboards and find hundreds of Cabbage Patch dolls that have been skinned alive, given haggis "hats" and had all their eyes replaced with live, tethered cicadas."

 

"He's astounding, Loulou. He claims to be able to tell me anything and everything about your past, present and future and I believe him. He already knows everything about you, your tastes, your schedule, even that you have Jesurum add lace and the Ursulines in that convent in Macon in Burgundy embroider little flowers on to the underwear that you buy from La Perla and Aubade."

 

I felt sick. Had he been going through my semainier, the perv?

 

"He even claims to know your thoughts!"

 

"And how scary is that?" I said. "But okay then: call him."

 

She took my cell phone and dialed and said "Hello Patrick" in her sex kitten voice.

 

"Now," I said, "ask him the name of the stallion that sired my first foal," and she did and I heard him say something.

 

Carla listened and then repeated Patrick's answer: "Abdullah,"

 

"Pfft. That's public knowledge," I said. "So ask him to tell you exactly what I'm going to say when I come back from the bathroom?"

 

Three minutes later, I came out and Carla said "He said you'll say "I'm still in love with Nicolas."

 

If the man had come up to me just then and asked to borrow my panty hose so that he could rob a Starbucks and told me that I could keep them on but that in that case it would mean that I would be upside down for about five minutes while he pistol-whipped the cashier but not to worry because no one would see my face, I would not have been more surprised. Because I actually was going to say that I was still in love with Nicolas, about whom I simply cannot stop thinking and I wonder if it's simply because I refused all of his many marriage proposals for twenty years and then when he became president sort of regretted it and the fact that Carla got him to marry her, but that is water under the bridge, only the bridge keeps moving and managing to stay just ahead of the water.

 

So I said "Carla, hang up at once," but I was still so stunned that I could barely make out Carla repeating "Just give him a chance, Loulou."

 

"Carla you're hardly in a position to be giving advice."

 

"Oh Loulou, that is so cruel."

 

Carla had called me, you see, on November 7, a Friday night, and cried "Loulou, this is terrible, I made a booboo."

 

"A 'booboo,' darling?

 

"Yes, I just gave an interview and I got carried away and told this huge lie and tomorrow morning in Saturday's Journal de Dimanche they'll be carrying it and I called the reporter and begged him to delete it and he said he was so sorry but that it had already gone to press and Loulou you've got to help me."

 

It all started the other day when Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, said that Barack Obama has an admirable suntan har har har. So Carla signed this French petition called "Yes We Can," calling for equal opportunity for minorities in France and then Carla told the interviewer "When I hear Silvio Berlusconi joke about the fact that Obama is 'always tanned', that makes me feel funny. But often, I am very happy that I was given French citizenship right after Nicolas and I got married in Loulou's garden earlier this year. French power has often had the same face: that of men who are white and ageing. That is why I can identify with this appeal." And Carla told me that Nicolas had taken that personally and that he had just cried and cried and cried in Rachida's arms.

 

 

Getting revved up and then out of control, Carla said that as racist as France may be it still has never had the kind of "brutal racism" that the United States has, although a lot of the families of people who got shipped out to Auschwitz said "Uh, excuse me," but Carla said "Hello? Carla is talking?"

 

Anyway, Carla then recalled how she had gone on this like modeling shoot in South Carolina in 1992 and she and the other models had all been required to eat in their rooms because this local restaurant owner had taken one look at British model Naomi Campbell, who happens to be black, and said "No way we're gonna serve one of them people." (http://www.lejdd.fr/cmc/societe/200845/carla-bruni-sarkozy-il-faut-aider-les-elites-a-changer_163651.html) The claim was greeted with skepticism in some quarters, but Carla looked at the reporters and said "I am telling the truth, it really happened," and even though her pants exploded into flames the French media just totally swallowed it even if the rights organization that started the Yes We Can petition in France called Carla and said Carla thanks so much for your testimony you can stop now. But then Carla told me that she'd upped the ante by giving a second interview in order to get Michelle Obama's attention and respect what with Michelle being our new BGF and the so-called European White House having now moved from 10 Downing Street to 60, rue de Varenne.

 

"Just last month," Carla told Le Parisien, "I was having lunch at Le Cirque in New York with the most exclusive African-American association in the United States, The Club of Twelve i.e., Dr. Dre, Terrell Owens, Randy Moss, Dr. Benjamin Carson, Tom Morello, Denzel Washington, Vernon Jordan, Spike Lee, Morgan Freeman, Bob Herbert, Fifty Cent and Colin Powell. Well, these two foul-mouthed enormous white bubbas pulled up in front of the restaurant in their rusty old Dodge pickup with the gunrack on the rear window and a bloodhound baying in the back. One of them had on overalls (and nothing else) and the other had on jeans that his massive stomach had pushed so far south that the northern hemisphere of his ass was visible to all the diners. They went straight to the famous Le Cirque Express takeaway window, of course, because they would hardly have been seated without jackets, and the Ass barked at Mr. Bellanca, the chef, "Hey, Christophe! Our order of fried pickles and corny dogs not even ready? Y'all better throw in a free bag of them chocolate Frankenstein heads for making us wait." Then they each snatched a fistful of Moon Pies and Fritos off the clips next to the take-out window and leaned back on their elbows against the counter and surveyed the restaurant and its customers, until the Club of Twelve caught the eye of Overalls and he nudged his buddy. "Looky there."

 

And the Ass said "Well I'll be goddamned. Right here in Midtown Fuckin' East."

 

"Y'all there," shouted Overalls, "sittin' with that nice white girl, y'all are black. Now I want y'all to finish up your carpaccio of daikon radish and avocado and yuzu cucumber granité and get up and go on 'bout y'all's bidnis so there won't be any trouble, ya heah?"

 

And Dr. Dre and Vernon Jordan and the other men all started shaking and crying and Colin Powell said "Oh pwease pwease, massa, we jes a bunch o' coloured boys what don't knows no betters," and they all just sat there sobbing and Overalls said "All right, son, I'm gonna let you finish up that bite of Atlantic Chatham cod and red pepper shiitake chutney you got on your fork, and then all we wanna see is all y'all's boots scootin' out that door.' And all twelve of the men got up and left and they were all just trembling and whimpering and I was absolutely shocked and as we all know," said Carla, shaking her head ruefully along with Le Parisien's reporter, "this sort of scene is repeated across America every single day."

 

Of course, it was our scrumptious new BGF Michelle Obama had kicked it all off for Carla with her claim that "If we lived anywhere else on the planet, a man with the credentials and commitment and the ability of Barack Obama - we wouldn't have any questions. Why, just look at the number of black men and women in positions of power in European countries with significant black populations. In France alone, there are so many examples. Out of a total of 550 members of Parliament, there is one black member from mainland France and none of Arab origin, and that's just one example. So we Americans have a lot of catching up to do." (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us)

 

Wait, I thought, till my darling Michelle discovers that Parisians love Moon Pies, only they call them Nigger Heads, and then has a server offer her a platter of chocolate delicacies-"Would Madame care for a Nigger Kiss or perhaps this Flemish specialty," readily available in Paris, and which one Wikipedia translation squeamishly Bowdlerizes as "Negress Titties"-only you'll never hear about them unless you live here, because the foreign press takes care to keep this aspect of France, the land of human rights, in a closet already bulging with skeletons. Wait till my deliciously innocent Michelle discovers that French football fans on September 17, 2007 chanted racist slurs at Burkinabe player Boubacar Kébé (and that he was red-carded for retaliating); that in February 2008 French fans unfurled a racist banner, again aimed at Kébé; and that on February 17, 2008, player Abdeslam Ouaddou was racially abused by a fan (but was punished for challenging the racist); and that in March 2008 Frédéric Mendy was racially abused by Grenoble fans. And I'm sending Michelle a reminder of just how people think here in "anywhere else on the planet." Here's the current image used on the box of Banania breakfast drink (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d9/Banania4.jpg). Most French people say nigger.

 

I want to reiterate my support to Carla publicly so that she will know that I am behind her 99%! So, if anyone can sort of provide an itsy bitsy shred of proof that what she said happened actually happened, i.e., that Naomi Campbell was refused service thirty years after the civil rights act and that a South Carolinian businessman or woman was so suicidally racist that they ran the 100% risk of losing their business in a slam-dunk lawsuit for racial discrimination, then I, Louise de la Paumardiere, will invite that person to have tea here in Paris at my canteen, AKA the Ritz (offer not available in NA, MA and FKU). I'll even serve you myself, wearing only one thimble or two bbs, winner's choice.

 

"Did I do bad, Loulou?"

 

"Carla, ma poupée, you and Nicolas and I have agreed that the best way for you to prepare your way out of the marriage is for you to start claiming irreconcilable political differences. But Nicolas doesn't need this added pressure right now. He was already humiliated by being late for this year's Armistice Day ceremony which has begun on the 11th hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month since 1918, until this month, when the moment of silence had to start at 11 fucking 10 am because Nicolas found the label inside his boxers "scratchy" and made the helicopter turn back to Paris. And then there was that student in the beautician school, all too obviously one of Nicolas' former little mistresses, who refused to shake hands with the President of France himself (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqfo-f38cxY&NR=1) and who looked like she was just going to go ahead and gouge his eyes out with her comb and who was mentally giving him such a big spanking, tapping her comb in her hand and ostentatiously turning her back to him and spanking him harder and harder, but so elegantly summing up the general feelings of the whole of France that she will be running for President on the Socialist Party ticket, having become more popular overnight than the two incompetent mythomaniac women currently battling for the nomination. Carla, my darling, why couldn't you have mentioned James Byrd or the Jena 6 or any of the gazillions of other easily verifiable examples of brutal American racism? Why did you have to make up such an obvious fiction?"

 

And Carla said "Well, Loulou, Nicolas says that French people can't tell the difference between fact and fiction because the State blurs the distinction for them starting in nursery school. You know that we have weekly wrestling matches in France, (the April 27, 2009 Bercy arena match will be sold out), and that three-fourths of Parisians believe that what they are seeing is real. When I said that those things "happened," I didn't mean that those things actually happened. I said that they did just to make Michelle Obama love me instead of merely like me because I found her a bit standoffish the last time she was here."

 

"Well, Carla sweetheart, I believe that you did actually pull her hair."

 

Then Carla looked at me and said "Loulou, pull my hair. And slap me. I need it."

 

And I turned off the light.

 

Tuesday, November 18. Another dinner at the presidential palace. I sat between Hector Bianciotti, a member of the French Academy, which is devoted to the destruction of the French language through strangling, and to the left of Nicolas. Carla was to Nicolas' right, and I leaned forward and was absolutely astonished to see that to Carla's right was her American, looking rather better than I'd remembered, although by the time I spotted him my 1947 Cheval Blanc binoculars were more or less glued to my face.

 

I had on a black light weight wool Yves St Laurent dress, enough Harry Winston diamonds to fill an ice bucket and, my greatest weapon, a black crocodile Kelly bag with a copper engraving plate with a bull etched onto it by Pablo Picasso, one of ten plates he gave to me for my tenth birthday and each is now bolted onto a different Kelly bag (my favourite is the minotaur I had put on the baby blue lizard one). They can never go out of style, absolutely devastate the New York and London society women, and when I carry any one of those bags I feel competition-free. And yet Nicolas barely looked at me the entire evening, and barely allowed the American to look at anyone but Nicolas.

 

Nicolas of course knew that he would be meeting Carla's Texan, so he had had his lackies prepare a briefing book for him and after he'd asked the American ambassador in English "So what you sink of zees Obama, omigod he is just so French!" he spent most of the evening speaking in French to Carla's American.

 

"Monsieur," he said, "did you know that that the first European visitors to Texas in 1528 were cannibals, and that the first Texans ever encountered by Europeans were tall Karankawa warriors who carried six-foot cedar longbows and were living in marital relationships with their male eunuch partners and who were disgusted by the Europeans' cannibalism? And that the first European name ever given to Texas was l'Ile du Malheur, The Isle of Unhappiness? And that the civilizing mission of France in February 1685 took our great explorer René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, to Texas, where he wandered inland from Galveston and then in January 1687, was ambushed by his assistant, Dr. Pierre Duhaut, who while La Salle lay dying, mocked him with the words: 'Oh, the great pasha! Look at you now!' And then as an alligator dragged La Salle's body into Garcitas Creek, Duhaut and others chopped five other La Salle loyalists to death with hatchets? Your Texas is a dangerous place, ha ha!"

 

The Texan seemed rather enchanted with Nicolas' attention to him and with the anecdotes Nicolas had rather obviously prepared for the occasion. He smiled and shook his head to say no he did not know those things and by dessert must have had something akin to degenerative arthritis of the zygapophyseal joints because I never heard him say a word or answer any of Nicolas' many questions in the affirmative.

 

I recognized Nicolas' over-preparation from the many times he'd tried to conquer me, and I remember the first time he came to La Paumardiere back in 1981 and we played tennis and I had a killer serve (100 mph, no kidding, which is monstrously good and not just for a girl), but I double faulted twice in a row and Nicolas jumped over the net and jogged over to me, his arms rocking side to side with a sort of jovial bonhomie, and he said "Louise, if I may," and he stood behind me and placed one hand over mine on the racket and the other on my stomach and said "You can't be a good server until you relax," and I was melting in his arms and then he said "How tall are you?"

 

And I said "Five seven."

 

And he said "5'7," excellent. That means that your racket reaches to eight feet in the air when you serve. If you hit the ball with no spin at 100 miles an hour, and your racket is five degrees past vertical when you hit, the ball goes long. If it's six degrees past vertical when you hit it, it goes into the net. But if you're holding your racket at five point five degrees when you hit the ball, the ball goes right into the box."

 

And I was supremely impressed, but then so was Nicolas and I can't remember how many times I've wanted to wipe that expression of smug, post-coital self-congratulation off his face with a good Black & Decker nail gun. But I must say that I was taken with him as I watched him jog back to the net, this time using his Olympian hurdler gait, and he cleared the net magnificently except for his toe which grabbed the top and the net seemed to spin him up like a spider gift-wrapping a dung-beetle and then spewed him back out face first onto the hard red clay but Nicolas just got right back up and stood there bleeding in his receiving stance and I said "Head wounds are always so spectacular aren't they?" and he nodded and I said "Ready?" and he sobbed "Ready," and bled some more.

 

"And did you know," the droning continued, "that in 1839, your second President, the poet Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, convinced the Senate of the Republic of Texas to revoke a treaty that granted land and peace to the Cherokee people and that their 83-year-old chief refused to run, and so on Lamar's orders, Chief Diwali Bowles (http://www.amazon.com/Bowles-Cherokees-Civilization-American-Indian/dp/0806134364) was shot in the head and strips of his skin were taken by the Republic's soldiers as souvenirs? And that in 1898 one of his descendants named Chief Padraig Greywolf Bowles, who was obsessively and perhaps even insanely interested in pursuing the history of his father's, Chief John Bowles' own pursuit and murder, as well as that of his grandfather Chief Diwali Bowles, wrote this huge book in Cherokee called The Book of the Islands, of which only one copy is known to exist? And that in it he hinted that the people living in the Malheur Islands off of Matagorda Bay in the Gulf of Mexico were the descendants of the La Salle expedition and of the few survivors of the Cherokee Massacre of 1839? And that it wasn't until 1972 that scholars confirmed that the inhabitants of Malheur Island aren't speaking French Creole at all, as had long been assumed, but pure seventeenth-century French? And," said Nicolas, "it is said that the book contains something called Magical Lies that can make you immortal!"

 

As I listened to Nicolas, I thought my, oh my, how he had memorized his briefing book, as usual, but why? To impress the Texan, whom he would in all likelihood never see again? Or, more probably, to make the American look like a Neanderthal and so win back Carla? And I said "Nicolas, you are astounding. You've won my heart again."

 

And Nicolas said "Loulou, call me."

 

And after dinner we all, even Nicolas, went over to Man Ray, Johnny Depp's club in the rue Marbeuf and we went upstairs and sat on the floor smoking and then I noticed that the American had disappeared. And I said "Carla, where's your American? Is something wrong?"

 

And she said "Maybe." And I prodded her and she told me that one of her girlfriends, named Christine, who had written Carla's biography, (http://www.amazon.fr/Carla-Bruni-Itinéraire-Sentimental-est-elle/dp/2350760804/ref=pd_sim_b_2/277-8437462-1719866) and had even been a BGF until she had moved in with Carla's ex-live-in, Jean-Paul Enthoven, once Carla had had a baby with Jean-Paul's son, something for which, go figure, Carla never forgave Christine, had now betrayed her again. And I asked her to explain and she said that that same afternoon before coming to the Elysee, she had been wandering around the American's library in the rue de Varenne and had found a copy of one of Christine's books called The Key in the Lock, which gives advice to women about when and how to get rid of their boyfriends and husbands, she looked inside it. And then she borrowed it. Carla took the book out of her purse and held it open towards me and said: "Look, Loulou. Just look!" And I read the handwritten dedication: "To my magnificent Texan, I give the extra key to my lock," (view image) which probably indicates that Christine, too, is in love with Carla's long, tall inarticulate Texan.

 

And I looked at it and went "So?"

 

And Carla went "So? So he's two-timing both me and you with Christine. And now I'm pretty sure Nicolas has fallen for him too, which could lead to three-timing."

 

And I said "Oh Carla, don't be ridiculous. It's not his fault if women fall in love with him, although it's still a mystery to me why they ever would. And a) he can't be two-timing you because you don't even sleep, or rather have sex, together, as he's too busy talking about yours truly. And b) he can't be cheating on Y.T. because we don't even know each other. And c) if you think he's two-timing you, then why are you so eager to dump such a nice New World philanderer on me?"

 

"Oh, Loulou, you know that's not it. I just feel that he has something to give you that no one else can. The things he knows about you are inexplicable and…and…irresistible."

 

"It must be his way with words," I said.

 

"That's not very nice, Loulou," said Carla. "One thing that I do know is that he loves you as much as I do. You must go to the Hall of Mirrors next month and get to know him. Please, Loulou, please say you will. He'll be heartbroken if you don't go."

 

And I said "Carla, my darling, I wouldn't go to Versailles on Christmas Eve unless it were a matter of life and death."

 

"Loulou," said Carla, "it's much more important than that."

 

© 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.