Les Folies Sarkozy

Laurent Joffrin, top editor at the left-leaning Liberation newspaper, said Sarkozy suffers from the "hubris" that inflicts politicians with "too much success, who think anything is possible, they can walk on water. He doesn't see limits anymore."

"He's had success because he's renouncing the usual standards of behavior," Joffrin said, "but he's going to fail because it's too much and too tiring, and he can't hold the rhythm and stay clear and energetic for such a long time."

His term has offered rich fodder for the Internet, with several spoofs of Bruni singing love songs to Sarkozy, a fake contest to spend Valentine's Day with the first couple at a cheap restaurant on the Champs-¿lys¿es, pictures of pilfered goods in the president's bling-bling collection, and a Sarkozy look-alike promoting a sexual potency drug.

If the French think they've seen everything, they can think again. Three books are just hitting the shelves that deconstruct the Sarkozy-Bruni love affair in glorious detail. Such as Bruni supposedly telling a friend, "I want a man with nuclear power." Such as the former model reportedly inviting Sarkozy up to her apartment for a cup of coffee when he drove her home after their first dinner together, and Sarkozy replying, "Never on a first date."

Tuesday night, L'Express magazine posted excerpts from Bruni's first interview as first lady on its Web site, in which she put the relationship on further display. "Between Nicolas and me, it wasn't quick, it was immediate," she declared.

She rejected sensational stories about her past and assertions that the wedding happened too quickly. "I understand that people are worried about what I am, especially with these portraits of me that are often fantastical and sometimes awful. But I want to reassure the French. I am 40, I am normal, serious, aware, simple, even if I am privileged," she was quoted as saying.

"Just as Nicolas doesn't resemble his predecessors, I would like me, too, while respecting the dignity of the post, to keep my personality," she said. "I don't yet know what I might do as first lady, but I know how I will do it: seriously."

She also issued an apology for her harsh words about the editors of a French Web site, which reported that days before the wedding, Sarkozy sent his former wife a text message: "If you come back, I cancel everything." Bruni had compared the journalists to collaborationists who denounced Jews during World War II. She and Sarkozy also deny the report.

While many French seem captivated by the spectacle of a rock star president at the same time they are repulsed by it, people in other European countries sometimes find the show endearing.

"Sarkozy is behaving like a teenage boy who just got his first girlfriend -- it's weird, but there's something flamboyantly French about it," television producer Alan Eyres, 35, said while sitting at a central London coffee shop.

"He's had everything out in the open, and it's hard to have a go at him because of that," Eyres said. "Sarkozy says, it's here, you know what's happening. He's so wrapped up in it he wants to share it and he's entirely unembarrassed by it."

Special correspondents Corinne Gavard in Paris and Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.