PRESIDENT Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni could prove to be an explosive combination, according to the latest book about their whirlwind romance, which claims that the Italian former supermodel and singer has just as volcanic a temperament as her husband.

The Italian, famous for a string of high-profile romances, “regularly” threw one former boyfriend’s belongings out of the window of their flat in Paris in the 1990s, says the book.

“She gets into a real rage, particularly with her boyfriends,” a close friend of Bruni was quoted as saying.

The latest in a series of books about the couple, Carla and Nicolas, the True Story, is unusual in that it appears to have the backing of Bruni, 40, who talks about her meeting with the French leader at a dinner party last November – “I wanted to marry him straight away,” she says – and an adolescence marked by a “curiosity about boys” and “various drugs”.

The authors, two respected journalists, describe a tempestuous two-year relationship with Arno Klarsfeld, a lawyer and son of the Nazi hunters Serge and Beate, whom she met on Concorde in 1994.

“She would regularly send her chéri’s things flying out of the window,” they write. “She was fed up at the sight of him in front of the television watching nature documentaries.”

Sarkozy, who is struggling to modernise France with a series of economic and social reforms, is also renowned for a volatile temperament. He has often given the impression of wanting to pick a fight with protesting workers and provoked outrage recently by telling a member of the public who refused to shake his hand to “sod off, poor jerk”.

Bruni, who claims in the book to have been undergoing psychoanalysis since the age of 29, is said to have “calmed down” the president even if he regards therapy as a waste of time and puts psychoanalysts “in the same category as fortune tellers”.

The president was apparently infuriated when his mother, who was initially opposed to the marriage, told an interviewer that “he [Sarkozy] has all too many to choose from”, suggesting that Carla was just the latest in a series of romantic adventures.

“Carlita”, as the president calls her, was just as smitten as her suitor. After being bombarded by gifts and demands for her hand in marriage, she told him that he must ask for the consent of Marine Delterme, an actress and one of her best friends, before she would say “oui”.

Delterme was having dinner with a group of friends in a restaurant when the president called to ask for the hand of her friend in marriage. Some around the table were sceptical but she gave her agreement. Bruni had her doubts, it turns out.

“The pressure is enormous,” she told one of her friends. “I’m afraid of losing all those who have supported me until now.” She was referring to allies on the political left, where Sarkozy has for long been regarded as a dangerous rightwinger.

Her last political boyfriend had been Laurent Fabius, a former Socialist prime minister. The book quotes a friend as saying that “it took him nine months to get over her”.

In the Elysée Palace Bruni has shown a territorial streak, particularly towards Rachida Dati, the justice minister and once the president’s favourite. Bruni has told Dati not to telephone or text her husband so early in the morning.

During a party, when the two women found themselves in view of the bed in the president’s private quarters, Bruni is reported to have commented: “You would have liked to occupy it, wouldn’t you?”

Last week Dati’s star appeared to be fading. She was excluded from a ministerial meeting with the president, and a magazine claimed that Yves Saint Laurent, the fashion designer who died last Sunday, had threatened legal action to recover clothes that his firm had lent her and that Dati, the daughter of a Moroccan bricklayer, seemed reluctant to part with.

Dati, whose bare shoulders had raised eyebrows at a banquet in Windsor Castle, also found herself at the centre of a controversy over the annulment of a marriage because the bride was not a virgin. She had backed the ruling but was forced to call for an appeal after protests.

Sarkozy came to her defence, claiming that she was being “lynched”. Carla has also denied wanting to get rid of her.

“I am not Cécilia. I don’t have a blacklist,” she is quoted as saying in the book. This was a reference to reports that before demanding a divorce, Sarkozy’s former wife had engineered the removal of presidential aides who had been disloyal to her.

Even so, Bruni’s welcome to Dati at the birthday party she organised for the president in January seemed lukewarm.

“I hesitated to invite you,” she apparently told the justice minister. “But finally I did.”

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