Adieu Already? France's First Couple Divorces

Since then, Cécilia, a 49-year-old former model, has dropped almost completely from sight. By some counts, she has attended only three presidential functions since Sarkozy took the oath of office in May.

In July, at the request of her husband, she traveled to Libya and negotiated directly with leader Moammar Gaddafi to free five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor jailed there. That brought howls of protest in France, and a parliamentary hearing into the matter opened Wednesday.

Sarkozy, 52, invited more media coverage of his personal life during the campaign than any previous presidential candidate, and their marriage could not avoid scrutiny. Cécilia, who had been an adviser and had an office adjoining Sarkozy's when he was interior minister, played virtually no role in his campaign, and did not even vote in the second round of the presidential election.

She was ambivalent about the prospect of life in the Elysee Palace, once telling an interviewer: "I don't see myself as first lady. The whole idea bores me. I'm not politically correct."

Sarkozy met Cécilia Ciganer Albeniz in 1984 when, as mayor of the Paris suburb of Neuilly, he officiated at her first marriage to a famous television anchor, Jacques Martin. Sarkozy reportedly fell instantly in love with her.

After the marriage, Sarkozy and his first wife became close friends with Jacques and Cécilia, according to accounts by Sarkozy biographers, and he was named godfather to one of their daughters. Sarkozy and C¿cilia secretly started dating and eventually divorced their first spouses. They were married in 1996 and have a son, Louis. Each also has two children from their previous marriages.

They separated briefly in 2005, and during the split the magazine Paris Match ran a cover photograph of Cécilia strolling in New York hand-in-hand with a man it identified as her lover. By his own accounts, Sarkozy was devastated, and newspaper reports at the time said he was so distraught that he failed to show up for a major cabinet meeting.

"He was clearly very much in love with her and felt a great passion for her, but I'm not sure it was reciprocal," said a leading French political analyst, who did not want to be quoted by name talking about Sarkozy's personal life.

"In 2005, when there was this public row and there was media coverage of her cavorting around with this significant other, at the time he was really hurt, and it was not simply his ego, which is fairly substantial. He is prone to getting splitting headaches, to the point where he actually had to skip a ministers' meeting," the analyst said.

"Whether he's had a resumption of headaches, I don't know, but it wouldn't be out of character. So what becomes a serious question is how will this affect his ability to operate? It could help," he said. "What it does to his image is a different matter. In a perverse way, it may reinforce the image that he is just like the rest of us, and whether that is a positive or a negative is an unanswered question, because the office of the president here has monarchial overtones."

In a book published before the election, Sarkozy conceded that he had exposed his wife to "too much pressure, too many attacks and not enough attention from me. . . . Our relationship didn't hold up."

But in the end, "we cannot, nor do we know how to, distance ourselves from each other," he wrote, declaring it "impossible!"

Researcher Corinne Gavard contributed to this report.