You are in:
- Contents » Colour Supplement
Sarkozy's SMS Plea To Cécilia
A French magazine claims to have an SMS text message from Nicolas Sarkozy which begs his ex-wife, Cécilia, to return.
Sarkozy, who married Carla Bruni on Saturday, is reported to have texted "If you come back, I'll cancel everything" (Si tu reviens, j'annule tout).
The message, published in the left-wing Le Nouvel Observateur, is claimed to have been sent just eight days before his marriage to Bruni.
Sarkozy, it says, did not receive a reply, and so the marriage went ahead. The newspaper reports a witness claiming that the President was less thrilled than one might have expected him to be during the ceremony.
It also draws attention to the weird war of attrition between the estranged Sarkozy family. He brought Bruni to Petra, Jordan, where Cécilia went with her lover Richard Attias. Sarkozy bought Bruni an engagement ring identical to that Cécilia wore; one of the witnesses at the wedding, Carla de Mathilde Agostinelli, is a long-time intimate of Cécilia's...
Others have even remarked on the physical resemblance between the two women (though Carla is ten years younger than Cécilia).
For her part, the former first lady's behaviour in the final months of her marriage was increasingly bizarre: Refusing to vote for her husband, her sulky performance on the night of his election victory, her appalling lack of manners concerning an invitation to the Bush family's summer residence. She
And then, of course, this text message, if it is indeed real. Who passed it to the newspapers? Surely Cécilia wouldn't stoop so low as to use this text as a means of attacking both Carla and Sarkozy? And, of course, surely Sarkozy wouldn't be so bloody dim as to send a text like that in the first place.
What is interesting is that despite the media's tut-tutting over the Bruni-Sarkozy-Cécilia affair, it has done no harm to their circulation: Reuters reports that le Nouvel Obs puts on 40 percent sales when it splashes Sarkozy and Bruni's mugs on its cover; centrist magazine L'Express adds 50 percent.
