Eyewitness acount: the night Sarkozy met ‘huntress’ Carla Bruni

A full account of how Nicolas Sarkozy wooed his wife Carla Bruni, which included the President ridiculing her former boyfriend Mick Jagger's skinny legs and telling her that she would be Marilyn Monroe to his JFK, has been published by a friend who was an eyewitness to the momentous event.

Jacques Seguela was the friend who invited them on a blind date at his home on November 13, 2007. But the soon-to-be married couple were unaware that Seguela, a 75-year-old former star of the advertising world, was studiously taking notes of the coup de foudre, which he describes as an "unexpected game of seduction between two wild beasts". The entire account is published this week as a book, Autobiographie non autorisee.

Seguela’s account suggests 54-year-old Sarkozy more than lives up to his nickname 'speedy'. After turning up late and without a tie, he is said to have been attracted "like a magnet" to Bruni, who had just turned 40. It was mutual: Bruni is said to have behaved like "the huntress Diana with velvet claws", toying with the President and using the informal tu, while warning him that she knew of his reputation as a womaniser.

"My reputation is no worse than yours," he replied. "I know you well without ever meeting you. I understand everything about you ... You make love because no one makes love to you. I know everything about you because I am so much you."

This is said to have brought the dinner party conversation to a standstill, but then Sarkozy whipped Carla into further ecstasy by promising to be in the front row of one of her forthcoming concerts. "We will announce our engagement. You will see, we will do better than Marilyn and Kennedy," he told her.

In full Mills and Boon mode, she replied: "Engagement, never! From now on I will only live with a man who gives me a child." Sarkozy came back: "I have already brought up five. Why not six?"

The President then leant over and whispered in Bruni's ear: "Bet you don't have the nerve right now in front of everyone to kiss me on the mouth." She did not reply. He then invited her to spend Christmas with him in Egypt. (She refused at the time, but later relented when they began their romance proper.)

Sarkozy warned Bruni that going out with him would not be easy as he was followed by paparazzi. She sniffed: "When it comes to the celebrity press, you are an amateur. My encounter with Mick [Jagger] stayed secret for eight years. We passed through all the capitals of the world and no photographer ever caught us."

Bruni then explained how she disguised the Rolling Stones frontman, then married to Jerry Hall, with false beards and strange hairstyles. But the talk of Jagger stung Sarkozy, said Seguela. He responded: "How could you have stayed eight years with a man who has such ridiculous calves?"

Seguela said he concluded straight away that Bruni had the hots for the President because she wore flat-soled pumps, a practice that she has since adopted to avoid towering over her shorter husband.

The couple, whom Seguela describes as Shakespearean, left together that night and the presidential car dropped Bruni off at her home after she had given him her telephone number. Bruni is said to have called her host ten minutes later and complained: "Your chum - what charm, what intelligence, what attention, what energy, what seductiveness. But I find him a bit of a boor. I left him my number and he still hasn't called." He soon did, however, and they married seven weeks later.

 
  ·