Four summers ago, during the international hiatus between one Covid lockdown and another, I interviewed Carla Bruni, the supermodel turned singer who married the French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Their sudden romance in the autumn of 2007 was a coup de foudre that made international headlines and instantly healed the broken heart that the cuckolded president had been nursing in the Élysée Palace since his divorce from his second wife.
Bruni was everything he could have hoped for and, on the afternoon of our interview, she was everything I could have hoped for: charming, coquettish, enigmatically French yet ridiculously candid. For instance, although she was speaking from the pair’s Paris home to plug her new album, she happily told me in what circumstances she would murder her husband, and how.
