Nicolas Sarkozy’s travelling court at Windsor will include his latest mother-in-law, Marisa Bruni-Tedeschi, 77, who became a public figure in France during her daughter’s whirlwind romance with the President.

Andrée Sarkozy, the President’s 81-year-old mother, had also been due to come, but ill-health was reported to have forced her to cancel her plans.

Mr Sarkozy made friends with Carla Bruni’s widowed mother, a retired concert pianist who uses her maiden name of Borini, almost as soon as he began the romance with the model and singer in late November.

The future belle-mère was in tow when the couple made their first public outing, to Disneyland Paris in December, and Mr Sarkozy took her to the Vatican when he visited the Pope in January, before his marriage in February to her daughter.

Ms Borini provided the first public confirmation of her daughter’s latest romance, when she said in December: “Carla is living a real love story. I think they complement each other very well.”

The former pianist also speculated about a marriage weeks before the President had given any public hint of one. She also raised eyebrows by appearing on a full page of Paris Match wearing only underwear.

Ms Borini, whose husband, Alberto Bruni-Tedeschi, left her a fortune on his death in 1996, was said always to have dreamt of a royal match for her daughter. When the family moved from Turin to the Côte d’Azur in the 1970s, Ms Borini encouraged the young Carla to socialise with Monaco’s prince and princesses, according to Maria Anna Parolin, their former nanny. The Bruni-Tedeschis had two other children, Valéria, a film-maker, and a son, Virginio, who died in 2006.

The publicity over the family, whose fortune comes from the Turin tyre industry, has opened one of the family’s darker secrets. It emerged during the winter that Alberto Bruni-Tedeschi was not Carla’s natural father. She was born in 1967 during a six-year affair between Ms Borini and Maurizio Remmert, a musician and businessman.

“I was 19 when I began to have relations with Marisa, a pianist, then 32,” Mr Remmert told the Brazilian newspaper O Estado. “We were constantly together as musicians . . . She was married and we did not reveal that I was the father when Carla was born, in 1967. This story, in Turin, is well known.”

Ms Borini declined to comment.

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