OVER the past few weeks a French cable television channel has been playing Love Actually, the film featuring Hugh Grant as a bachelor British prime minister who is smitten with a member of his staff.

France is lapping it up - the French prime minister’s household enjoyed a viewing recently – but no film could compete with the Gallic version unfolding in real life as Nicolas Sarkozy, the pint-sized president, is left on his own at the summit of power after separating from Cécilia, his glamorous wife.

Their divorce proceedings have unleashed a torrent of speculation about how “super Sarko”, as the hyperactive leader is known, will fare as the first bachelor head of state in France since Napoleon divorced Josephine when she could not bear him a child.

From François Mitterrand’s “secret” family to the escapades of Jacques Chirac – when he was mayor of Paris his nickname was “three minutes including shower” – French politicians’ love lives follow a colourful tradition. Although elected on a platform of “rupture” with the past, Sarkozy is unlikely to be the exception. Far from it.

In what seems certain to become a national pastime, speculation began last week about who would be the next “première dame” as the country prepared for the unprecedented spectacle of a president playing the field.

Sarkozy, who has two grown-up sons from his first marriage, is often described as a seductive figure and Cécilia, a tall former model who has two grown-up daughters from her own first marriage, enjoys the same reputation. Together they have Louis, a 10-year-old son, but the marriage had deteriorated recently to such an extent that Cécilia stopped appearing with Sarkozy in public, fuelling rumours that they may have sought comfort elsewhere.

“I dedicated 20 years of my life to Nicolas, 20 years that were not always easy, far from it,” Cécilia, 49, said yesterday in Elle magazine. “They were 20 years in which I devoted myself to him in the shadow.”

Sarkozy, who has made clear in the past how crucial Cécilia was to his wellbeing, seemed, nevertheless, to have begun turning the page. There is no shortage of women to keep him amused.

As he came out of a meeting with ministers a few weeks ago, a photographer caught him carrying a letter which said: “I haven’t seen you for an eternity and I miss you . . . a million little kisses.”

A tête-à-tête lunch with Carole Bouquet, the actress, set tongues wagging if only because the former Bond girl in For Your Eyes Only has a reputation for casting spells over presidents: Mitterrand, the last Socialist leader, was so obsessed with her that he resorted to tapping her telephone.

Bouquet, 50, is a friend of Yasmina Reza, the country’s most celebrated playwright, whose recent book about Sarkozy’s presidential campaign showed him to be extremely flirtatious.

Reza described Sarkozy beaming at her one evening as he told her about the conversation he was simultaneously conducting with an attractive blonde, his other neighbour at the dinner table: “She just told me, ‘I dream of you every night’, isn’t that moving?” said Sarkozy to Reza, putting his hand on the woman’s bare back.

He was seen frolicking in a Paris nightclub recently with friends, among them Maud Fontenoy, an attractive yachts-woman whom he presented with France’s highest award, the Légion d’Honneur, in July in recognition of exploits that included a solo circumnavigation of the Antarctic.

Others have been struck by the affection he shows for Rachida Dati, the justice minister, even if she is described as one of Cécilia’s friends; and a question mark hovered over his feelings for Anne Fulda, a political journalist at Le Figaro newspaper with whom he had an affair after Cécilia left him for another man in 2005.

Even while conducting a relationship with Fulda, Sarkozy was begging his wife to return. After a year she did and, although furious at how her apartment had been redecorated by Fulda, agreed to a reconciliation in the summer of 2006. Fresh redecoration took place.

Cécilia denied suggestions that the couple might have stage-managed their reconciliation in time for the presidential election. “Nicolas and I have never lied,” she told Elle. “We tried to reconstruct, to save our relationship. Right until the end.” She said that she could no longer lead a “pretend” life.

“Divorcing is an act of honesty,” she added.

Read more about Sarkozy in our Paris blog

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