Read Charles Bremner's blog for Times Online from Paris

Carla Bruni fell in love with the brains and physique of Nicolas Sarkozy. She plans to stay sexy into old age and she takes a dim view of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister.

The Italian pop singer who married the French President in February discloses this in a book today which also reports the alleged jealousy of Rachida Dati, Mr Sarkozy's glamorous Justice Minister.

Walking through the Elysée Palace with Ms Dati, Ms Bruni pointed to the presidential bed and joked to her: “You would have really liked to have been in it, wouldn't you?”, according to the journalist authors of Carla and Nicolas, the True Story. Ms Bruni, who talked at length to Valérie Benaim and Yves Azéroual, the authors, denies claims by insiders that Ms Dati, 42, a close friend of the President, felt that she had been eclipsed by the former supermodel.

Ms Bruni talks in the book for the first time of her whirlwind romance, past lovers and her recording career. She describes the dinner party last November where she was invited as a blind date for the newly divorced President. That morning, Raphael Eindhoven, the philosopher from whom she had recently separated, “rolled his eyes when I pronounced the name of Nicolas Sarkozy”, she says.

Among the six dinner guests was Luc Ferry, another former lover of Ms Bruni who was recently Education Minister. Mr Ferry is quoted as listing his place in Ms Bruni's celebrity conquests. “I was between Laurent Fabius and Mick Jagger.” Mr Fabius is a former Socialist Prime Minister whose liaison with the model was well known. Mr Ferry filmed the Sarkozy-Bruni dinner meeting on his telephone video camera, the book says.

A member of the left-wing artistic world, Ms Bruni had never supported Mr Sarkozy, but she said that she was curious to meet him. “It all happened suddenly. I wasn't expecting someone so funny, so full of life. I was seduced by his physique and his intelligence,” she says. “He has five or six brains which are remarkably irrigated.”

Ms Bruni, who was said to be “quite tipsy”, asked Mr Sarkozy to drive her home from the dinner. He left her at her door but the following day he visited her at home and “under the immense glass ceiling of the bedroom, they got to know and discover each other better”, write the authors.

The woman whom Mr Sarkozy calls Carlita describes how they rushed to marry, on the advice of Bernadette Chirac, the previous first lady, so that Ms Bruni could accompany the President on his state visit to Britain in March. A few days before the wedding, the future bride took fright over the prospect of being cut off by the anti-Sarkozy intellectual and artistic world. “The pressure is enormous. I am afraid of losing everyone who has supported me up to now,” she told the journalists. Among those who dislike Mr Sarkozy is Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, the film director sister of the new Première Dame, the book discloses.

Ms Bruni says that she will continue to compose and record. “What is going to change is that I won't be performing on stage ... But it's not as if I was a stage animal like ... the Rolling Stones. And Madonna is about to start a tour at her age. I've still got time.”

The free-thinking Ms Bruni voices her distaste for Mr Berlusconi, who is widely seen as an ally and similar to France's radical rightwing President. “Berlusconi is a businessman who does politics. Nicolas is a real politician ... I have not felt good since [Berlusconi] was elected Prime Minister,” she tells the authors.

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