Carla (Babe) Bruni, First Lady of France.

[DKW 86 7,882]

WOW!

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/27/europe/sarkozy.php

The new Diana? In Britain, Carla Bruni steals the show

By Alan Cowell Published: March 27, 2008

LONDON: Was she the new Kennedy-Onassis or a reborn Diana? With her flat Dior pumps and calf-length gray overcoat, was she a high-school student on vacation or, as one columnist asked, "Jackie O dressed as a nun"?

When Carla Bruni, the 40-year-old former supermodel and new first lady of France, arrived here Wednesday with her husband on a state visit, her risqué image had been molded in advance, mostly by breathless accounts of her serial celebrity lovers and disparaging remarks about the value of monogamy.

But after appearances with the British royals, in Parliament and at a state dinner - with different Dior outfits for each event - Bruni emerged Thursday as the star of the visit, supplanting affairs of state with an affaire d'amour among British newspaper reporters wistfully competing for the fondest declaration of praise.

Indeed, if her husband, President Nicolas Sarkozy, had come here to woo his British hosts with a flattering speech to Parliament - compared by one writer to a "torrent of crème Chantilly sprayed from a high-pressure hose" - then his wife's slender frame and twinkling eyes upstaged his bid for elusive gravitas.

"Nicolas Sarkozy's seduction of the British started yesterday at 11.26 a.m. when his plane landed at Heathrow," Andrew Gimson wrote on the front page Thursday of The Daily Telegraph. "He brought with him his latest conquest, Carla Bruni, and many of us decided at once that if we were going to be seduced by anyone, we would rather be seduced by her."

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The overnight visit - with a stay for the visitors under one of Queen Elizabeth's many roofs at Windsor Castle west of London - was designed in part to draw France and Britain much closer after centuries of see-sawing relationships across the English Channel, which divides them with much more than water and geography.

Indeed, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, said Thursday that he wanted to update the 104-year-old "Entente Cordiale" between the two countries with an "Entente Formidable."

But if anyone was going to do that, it was Bruni, who spent Thursday visiting with the prime minister's wife, Sarah, at a charity lunch while their spouses attended to their business, not in the confines of 10 Downing Street but at the Emirates soccer stadium in north London. The stadium is home to the Arsenal club whose manager, like some of its top players, is French.

The new romance began to bud within seconds of her arrival.

As she stepped from the plane on Wednesday, a gallant Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, took her gloved hand and raised it to his lips. "Enchanté," The Sun tabloid had him saying in a photograph of the episode dubbed with cartoon bubbles of imagined conversation that showed Charles's wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, murmuring to her husband, "Easy, tiger."

Then Bruni was photographed and filmed beaming with Prince Philip, the queen's husband, while her husband looked on uneasily. "I do not like ze look of zees," The Sun had Sarkozy saying.

Among columnists, royal-watchers and exponents of hyperbole, it was a race for the most cloying of verbal cotton candy. "Were we looking at a new Jackie O or more of an Audrey Hepburn or perhaps, even, a touch of Diana," Robert Hardman wrote in The Daily Mail.

Another of the same newspaper's writers, Amanda Platell, struck a more skeptical note, reaching for the history books to describe Bruni's curtsy to the queen as the most calculated act of homage to a British monarch since Anne Boleyn bowed to Henry VIII to become his second wife in 1533.

"She has mastered the transformation from rock chick to chic - and she pulled it off before the most unforgiving audience in the world," Platell wrote.

Even Sarkozy seemed bowled over anew by the reception accorded to his wife of two months in Britain, especially when compared with scathing coverage in some French publications. "I am proud that people have seen her for what she really is and that there is a sense of justice," he told a French reporter at a news conference alongside Brown.

It seemed clear that the visit to London had been carefully prepared by the French president's aides as a kind of international coming-out party for the new first lady, who thoughtfully included her mother, Marisa Bruni-Tedeschi, in her entourage.

The fuss, however, could not cloak fissures in what was choreographed as a remarkable bonding between the two countries as Sarkozy prepares for France's six-month stint in the rotating presidency of the European Union beginning in July.

[DCWarEagle 0]

She is way hotter than Di or Jackie O ever dreamed of being.

[WinCrimson 61]

She is way hotter than Di or Jackie O ever dreamed of being.

She's got dangerous curves, but her mug isn't anything that fabulous. Don't get me wrong, I'd still serve her up my croissant.

I think Jackie is much more attractive considering the era. She's definitely got her beat in the face.

[lukeduke 8]

She is way hotter than Di or Jackie O ever dreamed of being.

She's got dangerous curves, but her mug isn't anything that fabulous. Don't get me wrong, I'd still serve her up my croissant.

I agree, I would practice French and show her my oui-oui

[AUTiger1 0]

Wow! Good looking woman.

[tiger88 934]

That is quite an impressive thigh.

[tiger88 934]

She almost looks like she's going cross eyed sucking a piece of black spaghetti down, lol. Other than that she is extremely hot.

Jackie O might have been that hot if she had hoed (sp?) it up in such a way, who knows.

[OldNewby 27]

She is way hotter than Di or Jackie O ever dreamed of being.

She's got dangerous curves, but her mug isn't anything that fabulous. Don't get me wrong, I'd still serve her up my croissant.

I think Jackie is much more attractive considering the era. She's definitely got her beat in the face.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Carla gets my vote.