SHE has hugged sick children in Israel and played with orphans in Tunisia. When she meets the Dalai Lama in southern France next week, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the glamorous first lady, will be ready to claim her crown as the French “queen of hearts”.

The folk singer and former supermodel may be walking into a minefield, however. A furious political row was raging around President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to delegate the meeting with the exiled Tibetan leader to his wife. Then he was accused of further pandering to the Chinese by attending the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing.

The opposition Socialists savaged him for putting business contracts above human rights, noting that Gordon Brown, Germany's Angela Merkel and even George Bush, the US president, had talked to the Dalai Lama without it appearing to hurt their respective country’s interests in China.

“He gets the gold medal for hypocrisy,” was how François Hollande, the leader of the Socialist party put it, noting that Sarkozy had promised previously not to be cowed by the Chinese – and to meet the Dalai Lama – only to cave in at the first threat from Beijing.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Euro MP famous for having led the student riots in May 1968, said Sarkozy was trying to use his wife like a “magic wand”, hoping that her presence next to the Dalai Lama at the inauguration of a French Buddhist temple on August 22 would help to fend off charges that he was ignoring human rights and the plight of Tibetans.

A cartoon in the left-wing Libération newspaper reflected public scepticism about Sarkozy’s “Chinese flip-flop”, showing Bruni-Sarkozy meeting the Dalai Lama and the latter asking: “Are you the minimum service?” This was a reference to one of Sarkozy's latest laws, which requires a minimum service of public transport during strikes.

Bruni-Sarkozy continues to describe herself as a “woman of the left”. She has come to be seen as the most striking example yet of a policy of “openness” that includes wining and dining Marxist trade unionists and inviting Socialists, women and members of ethnic minorities to join a “rainbow government” whose task is to modernise France.

It could backfire on the president, yet it seemed highly unlikely that Bruni-Sarkozy, a 40-year-old Italian-born heiress, would try to imitate Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the last Socialist president, who embarrassed the government with her enthusiastic embrace of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Mexico’s “Subcomandante Marcos” and other causes dear to the far left.

However, Bruni-Sarkozy has certainly taken France into new territory, if only as the first first lady to release an album.

It would be hard to imagine any of her stuffy predecessors singing about sex and drugs, let alone posing in a blood-red dress on the roof of the Elysée Palace as she did recently to promote her record. She was even seen strumming a guitar on American television and has publicly mentioned her desire to bear “Sarko” a child.

“I have the desire to make him happy, to calm him,” she told Barbara Walters, the American interviewer. Asked if a reference in one of her songs to “my lord . . . my orgy” referred to the leader of the world’s fifth largest economy she replied: “It’s applicable to any beginning of marriage.” Referring to her reputation as a croqueuse d’homme – or man-eater – she admitted: “I have a past . . . It would be shocking if I tried to hide it.”

Now that she has finished promoting her record, she has said that she wants to devote herself “100%” to the role of première dame. “I want to do my best to be as popular as possible, and not just in a superficial way: I would like to try to do something to help people,” she declared.

A meeting with the Dalai Lama can only further her quest for recognition as a Gallic “people’s princess”. Bruni-Sarkozy has said that her model is Jacqueline Kennedy, but presidential aides have made no secret of their hope that the public will warm to her as much as the British did to Diana, Princess of Wales.

A poll has shown that a majority of French people approve of her performance thus far, but although she has recently gained French citizenship her foreign origins may count against her. One internet blog-ger has renamed her as “Carlan-toinette”, a reference to Marie-Antoinette, the Austrian-born queen who was beheaded during the revolution.

Bruni-Sarkozy can only pray that things do not go wrong.

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