It would be a masterpiece of understatement to suggest that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is perhaps not a woman’s woman. She is the kind of minx who might sleep with your husband simply to annoy you, or to amuse herself, or because she was bored.

Worse, the husband would then be in some kind of desperate erotic thrall for all eternity (there are few women these days who exude not just sexual confidence but also a dark expertise at the amatory arts, and Madame Sarkozy is of their number).

Afterwards he would be insane with longing for a repeat performance but Bruni would have moved on, without a backward glance, although remembering the episode might cause her to bare her pretty teeth and laugh. If she could be bothered to remember, of course. Few women can utter the phrase “it meant nothing” with conviction, but I expect Bruni doesn’t find it overly problematic.

This is the woman who finally saw off the ultra-tenacious Texan supermodel Jerry Hall, and who is said to have exerted such a pull on Hall’s then husband Mick Jagger that she in effect ended their marriage.

When she lived with Jean-Paul Enthoven, the French philosopher, she decided one day that she liked his (married) son Raphaël better, so off she went and nabbed him - naturellement - and had a child, Aurélien, with him for good measure. His enraged dumped wife, Justine Lévy, went on to write a bestselling novel in which a Bruni-like character is described as being “a praying mantis” with a “Terminator smile”. (British women think French women are the epitome of chic and desirability and that you might as well give up and go home; French women feel the same way about the Italians - Bruni, although she lives in France, is from Italy.)

Utterly unembarrassed, Bruni wrote a sexy song - she is a talented lyricist and sings like a latterday Juliette Gréco - about being madly in love and having amazing sex. Just in case anyone was in any doubt, she called the song Raphaël. It sounds so intimate that listening to it is like voyeurism.

Of course, old Raphaël was history the moment the possibility of being the first lady of France raised its Sarkozy-shaped head. The possibility was made fact with dazzling speed, since it seems that whatever Bruni wants, Bruni gets. She reeled him in like the expert she is and here we are.

Sarkozy can’t keep his hands - or his adoring gaze - off his wife: he looks like a man who simply can’t believe his luck, who wakes up in the morning and pinches himself.

One shouldn’t love her, really, but I’m nearly as mad about her as he is. It’s not just the list of conquests, which number, inter alia, Jagger, Eric Clapton and (ew) Donald Trump (although she denies this). In this age of equality, we’re not supposed to think there is anything intrinsically impressive about dating successful and powerful men but there is: what’s sexy about failure or ploddiness? Besides, it’s not as if she wanted their money since, handily, she’s got plenty herself.

And it’s not just her extraordinary predatory determination, which oughtn’t to be admirable but somehow just is, in an 18th-century courtesan kind of way: Bruni is like something out of a racy historical novel, except she’s real.

It’s partly the honesty with which she has lived her rackety life, praising polygamy, explaining that she found monogamy “boring” and wisely observing that “love lasts a long time, but burning desire - two to three weeks”.

Unlike her supermodel counterparts, being put out to pasture to embrace ordinary family life held no allure for her. And why should it? She is educated, extremely bright, speaks three languages fluently and is cultured enough to record an album of poems by Yeats, Auden, Christina Rossetti and others which she has set to music.

Her credentials are impeccable. She is properly, old-fashionedly beautiful, with noninbred aristocratic features and good bones; so beautiful that she makes everyone else look like a pudding.

Someone who was at the dinner at Windsor last week told me that it was maddening to be seated on the same side of the table as Bruni, because even though the room and the pomp and the Queen were all eye-poppingly amazing, all anyone wanted to do was stare and stare at Bruni (who was busy charming grouchy old Prince Philip, who looked lit up, lucky chap.) It helped, of course, that she looked so at ease during this state visit - but then she would be at ease, since she is both an heiress and rather grand; the family home (and its art collection) in Turin was of Versailles-like splendour, although the family left it to move to France to escape kidnap threats from the Red Brigades.

What is most appealing about Madame Sarkozy is that she seems to be in on the joke. Like Madonna or David Bowie she is a mistress of reinvention.

In the week that Christie’s mischievously put a nude portrait of Bruni from her modelling days up for auction - the photograph is essence of Bruni: beautiful, not vulgar, but never the less blush-makingly provocative - Bruni was disembarking from her plane in a perfect little grey suit (John Galliano for Dior and thus appropriately Franco-Brit), buttoned up to the neck, and little flat shoes, looking for all the world like butter wouldn’t melt, even though she must have known that half the country had had a good ogle at her naked form in that morning’s newspapers, and even though she is exactly the kind of person who would wear the world’s most demure bourgeois dress, but with no underwear.

It is this sublime lack of embarrassment and this sublime surfeit of confidence that make me like her despite myself - that, and the fact that far from feeling anxious about her bosoms being on show across the country’s breakfast tables, she probably loved it. She is a born chameleon and will make Sarkozy the perfect wife and render him more happy than he ever thought imaginable, until she gets bored; she has shown already that she is the perfect consort.

We’re not supposed to like, or admire, women like Bruni: they don’t gladden the hearts of the sisterhood. There is nothing she won’t do to get what she wants and if there is nobody left standing afterwards, bof, that’s just too bad. Admittedly, you wouldn’t want the world to be overrun with Brunis - it might make life rather tragic for the rest of us - but luckily there’s only one of her. And what a one she is.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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