A day after President Sarkozy announced his divorce, his former wife Cécilia talked yesterday for the first time about how she fell out of love with the political virtuoso for whom power is “like a Stradivarius violin”.

Explaining her struggle to make her marriage work, Mrs Sarkozy, 49, depicted herself as the victim of unwelcome exposure to the public glare.

“Public life does not suit me, the person I am in my deepest self. I am someone who likes the shade, peace of mind and calm,” said Ms Ciganer-Albéniz, to use her maiden name. “I need to live in peace, in hiding. When you marry a political figure private and public life become one. That was the start of the problems.

“What is happening to me happens to millions of people. One day, you no longer feel at home in the couple. The couple is no longer the essential thing in your life. It doesn’t work any more . . . The reasons are inexplicable.”

She described how she drifted apart from a husband whom she admires as a statesman. “[The presidency] is for him like a violinist who has been given a Stradivarius. He suddenly has the opportunity to exercise his art,” she said. “It is not at all the same for me. I worked alongside him but I was not elected and did not want to be.”

The heart-to-heart with L’Est Républicain, a newspaper published in eastern France, ended the official silence around the troubles of “Super-Sarko”, 52, and the elegant wife whose absences and caprices had fed the gossip mill for months.

Mrs Sarkozy spoke for the first time of her months of estrangement in 2005, spent with Richard Attias, a French events organiser. Mr Sarkozy was the Interior Minister and a presidential candidate at the time. “I met someone and fell in love and left. Perhaps it was a bit rushed, given the media attention under which I was living at the time,” she said. “I wanted to behave correctly and come back to try to rebuild something, to return to the principles to which I was accustomed.”

For a year the Sarkozys had made a big effort for the sake of their children, Louis, their son, who is now 10, and two grown-up offspring each from previous marriages. “We tried to rebuild things, to put the family first,” she said. “We tried everything, I tried everything. It simply was no longer possible.”

Her words were a riposte to charges from some senior figures in the Socialist opposition that the Sarkozys’ 2006 reconciliation was a sham aimed at presenting an image of a happy family in the presidential campaign.

Mrs Sarkozy said that she had made an effort to play the role of First Lady. “I tried to become involved professionally, personally, but it didn’t go well every day.” She called her husband a statesman. “France deserves him and he deserves France. I was proud and happy for him,” she said.

She also disclosed that it was her idea and not her husband’s to travel twice to Libya to negotiate the release of Bulgarian nurses from prison last July. “I felt that I could do it even if the situation was blocked,” she said. “I said to Claude Guéant [the Chief of Staff], ‘I’m coming with you’. He was quite surprised and talked to the President, who said, ‘Let’s go for it. Take her with you’.”

She now plans to work in the humanitarian field and take care of her children. “I do not want to live in my past,” she said. “I don’t like living in ruins. The page turns. It’s very difficult and that’s normal, given the context and the stakes but I never regret my decisions.

A survey in Le Parisien newspaper found that 92 per cent of French people had not changed their opinion of Mr Sarkozy because of the divorce and 79 per cent said that it was not an important event in French politics.

Read Charles Bremner's blog on Cécilia

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