While France saw a lot of its newly elected president last night, mystery surrounded its new première dame. Cécilia Sarkozy, the 49-year-old wife of the victorious candidate, was absent from his victory speech and appeared at his side only for the celebrations – the first time that she has been seen in public since April 22.

The French media have long maintained discretion over politicans’ private lives, and made almost no mention of Mrs Sarkozy, although the apparently difficult state of the couple’s marriage has been the centre of internet gossip for weeks.

Mr Sarkozy has made clear that his wife will not perform an official role in the manner of the popular Bernadette Chirac.

The question of the Sarkozy marriage matters because the incoming President has talked of his deep attachment – even dependence on – the former model and accomplished pianist who was long his closest professional adviser.

“Even today, nearly 20 years after our first meeting, to pronounce her name still moves me,” Mr Sarkozy wrote in a book last year after Mrs Sarkozy returned from a ten-month affair.

Since the start of the campaign, in January, Mrs Sarkozy had been absent from public view, with the exception of an appearance with her husband on election day and posed photographs in a magazine.

Mr Sarkozy, who has an 11-year-old son with his wife and two grown sons from a previous marriage, has said only that he plans to move into the Elysée “with my family”.

The Chiracs were the first presidential couple since 1969 to live in the state mansion on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Presidents Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand stayed in their private Paris homes.

Mr Sarkozy’s staff say that Mrs Sarkozy has been active in the background of the campaign but recently took a holiday. In 2004, before their temporary separation, she said that the idea of being first lady “bored her stiff”.

The saga of Mr Sarkozy and his glamorous part-Spanish wife was a media staple until last year. The ambitious Gaullist broke with tradition and originally promoted his wife and son in the media. He blamed their overexposure and the pressures of being a public figure for the crisis in their marriage in 2005.

Mrs Sarkozy spent much of that year with Richard Attias, an events organiser, and Mr Sarkozy formed a relationship with Anne Fulda, a journalist on Le Figaro. “I had never known such an ordeal,” he wrote. “Never would I have imagined that I would be so profoundly distressed.”

His wife, he wrote, was the mainstay of his life and had now returned for good but would stay in the background.

The editor of Paris Match was dismissed by Arnaud Lagardère, the magazine’s owner and a close friend of Mr Sarkozy, for publishing a front-page picture of Mrs Sarkozy with her lover.

Libération, the main left-wing daily, breached the taboo over reporting politicians’ private lives last month when it published a column on her apparent absence. “If, as her prolonged absence suggests, the spouse of the favourite for the presidency really has left the conjugal home, it would seem legitimate and necessary that the media inform the public,” it said.

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