ONE of Carla Bruni’s jilted lovers has taken his revenge with a fictional account of their relationship in which the Italian supermodel, singer and French first lady is painted as cold and heartless.

Jean-Paul Enthoven, a silver-haired literary critic of 59, has good reason to feel bitter about Bruni, 40. She left him for Raphaël, his son, a professor of philosophy, with whom she had a child before marrying President Nicolas Sarkozy earlier this year.

The novel was the talk of le tout Paris last week and an example of the latest fashion among members of the French cultural elite for savaging each other under a flimsy fictional cloak where the characters are strikingly similar to real people.

Bruni has already fallen victim to this fad for the roman à clef. When Raphaël, 30, went off with Bruni, Justine Lévy, his wife, wrote a vitriol-filled novel about the break-up in which she referred to the Italian temptress as “the Terminator”. Now Enthoven Sr is having his say.

His novel is set in a mansion in the Moroccan city of Marra-kesh. A place of drug-fuelled debauchery in the 1960s, when it belonged to the late oil heir John Paul Getty, La Zahia, as the house is known, is owned today by Bernard-Henri Lévy, a philosopher friend of Enthoven and father of Justine.

A spirit of decadence still lingers about the house, where fashion designers, actors, politicians and an assortment of hangers-on are drawn, like bees around the honeypot, to Lévy and Arielle Dombasle, his actress wife.

It was in their house one Christmas that Raphaël fell under the spell of Bruni, who had been brought there for the weekend by his father, according to friends of the family.

In the book, Enthoven disguises Bruni as Lavinia, a wealthy, shopping-obsessed widow. He leaves his son out of the drama, describing instead his own bewitchment by the Italian beauty at a candlelit dinner on a terrace beneath the stars.

Around the table are a Russian actress, the local police chief and a French minister - a character modelled on Philippe Douste-Blazy, the former French foreign minister - who is holding forth on the danger of Islamic fundamentalists taking control of Morocco and murdering French holidaymakers in their swimming pools.

The narrator has eyes only for the Italian. Everything about her, he writes, suggests “an easy sensuality”. Her eyes are “the colour of young rain on a pond”. Chatting with her, however, he is filled with unease, wondering whether she is simply “shopping” and whether he is the item “that she was lacking”.

A year passes before they meet again, this time in Lavinia’s hotel room in Paris, where the narrator discovers that “her back had the softness of a silky toboggan”. Later, over a room service meal, she warns him not to get too attached and he notices a photograph of another man on her dressing table.

He calls her a few days later but she sounds unfriendly and “after a few anodyne words, she asked me coldly: ‘Do you have anything to add?’ She wished me a good day and our conversation ended there”.

When he telephones her another time he realises that “she was by the edge of a blue sea, under a radiant sky, with friends I imagined as being relaxed and amusing. This echo of a distant happiness from which I was excluded . . . ended up devastating me”.

They carry on meeting occasionally, but Lavinia insists on a “contract”. Each month, for example, they must cease to see or speak to each other for a week. The idea of this “visual and verbal fasting” is to show how attached they are to each other. Each has the right to break off the relationship “without the slightest explanation”.

Lavinia eventually takes advantage of this last clause and the narrator is devastated.

“I await the day when she will be nothing more than a scar, and then the day when that scar will be no more than a dead wound that I will caress with an incredulous finger.”

The book had Parisians speculating not only about what Bruni would make of it: Enthoven also takes a swipe at Lévy, who is described as obsessed with his BlackBerry and so possessive of his wife that he will not allow her to be left alone with another man.

“It seems to me like a fairly bleak portrait,” said Georges-Marc Benamou, a former Sarkozy cultural adviser, friend of the Lévys and regular guest at La Zahia.

There is also an amusing portrait of Alain Delon, the French actor, who sold the Moroccan villa to Lévy and starred in a 1997 film with his wife, who spent most of it naked. It was written by Enthoven and directed by Lévy.

Delon, says Enthoven, “would only return to La Zahia for big occasions. He needed, at least, a royal audience or the inauguration of some avenue bearing his name”.

As for Bruni, another invitation to the villa is unlikely.

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