Three times a lady - Carla Bruni

Is there nothing Mrs Sarkozy can't do? This week the woman we call Carla Chameleon switches roles again, from ex-model and elegant premiere dame of France to wistful chanteuse promoting a new album of love songs. How did she acquire the knack of changing hats so effortlessly, asks Jackie Hunter

THE first rule of success as a politician's wife: don't take advice from Cherie Blair. However, it is Mrs Blair we must thank for Carla Bruni's decision to stick at her singing career and, so soon after her marriage to French president Nicolas Sarkozy, release a third album – Comme si de rien n'etait ("As If Nothing Had Happened"), a paean to love and lust.

"Tony Blair's wife, who continued to work as a lawyer for her husband's entire leadership, told me that it was also frowned upon when she kept working, but that … it was fundamental for her to keep her profession," the model-turned-chanteuse and new European yardstick for glamour said this week in an interview with a French radio station.

Something about Bruni suggests she is not merely paying lip-service to the notion of career-womanhood – which she could easily do, having bagged an international statesman for a husband, garnering instant prestige as well as a fabulous lifestyle – and that something is her rather colourful past, which has made her a survivor.

After a lady's education at a Swiss boarding school, at 19 she became a model. The fashion world she entered in the mid-1980s paid homage to conspicuous consumption – money, glamour, sex and drugs fuelled the industry more blatantly than ever before and Bruni was in amongst it, becoming one of the celebrated mannequins of her generation. A catwalk favourite of Dior, Lacroix and Chanel, she combined elegance with minxy sex appeal, which also attracted the attentions of Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Donald Trump (who are reportedly among the "30 lovers" she admits to in a song on the new album).

At 30, Bruni quit the youth-obsessed profession and became a singer (with help from another former lover, music producer Louis Bertignac). She released her first album, Quelqu'un m'a dit, in 2002; the poetry-inspired No Promises followed it in January 2007. She had also become a mother, bearing a child to philosophy professor Raphaël Enthoven – who happened to be the son of her live-in lover, Jean-Paul Enthoven.

Bruni is a shameless mistress of reinvention, the kind of woman who stays one graceful step ahead of whatever game she chooses to play. A little bit scary, perhaps even a little bit mad and undoubtedly tough as old boots, at 40 the fragrant Carla is the leader's wife who has really lived life. And how well this serves her when it comes to acquiring a new role and a new image.

The combination of a very proper upbringing and a decade spent in a somewhat sleazy profession, being fêted for her beauty but also classically educated, means Bruni knows how to hold her own at state banquets with royalty as easily as she can in the hip nightclubs of the Marais.

During her modelling days, she claimed, she would "sneak in a copy of Dostoevsky and read it inside a copy of Elle", but she has also exposed a slightly trashy side: she showed a journalist at a lunch how she could make her nipples stand to attention, saying, "It's my party trick!" And she can carry off a severe, demure grey wool Dior coat and flat pumps, while the image of her stalking along a catwalk in swimwear and killer heels is still vivid in the memory of many fashion photographers.

Heiress, model, singer, mother, statesman's wife and sex symbol: Carla really has pulled it off in a way that Cherie Blair and most other leaders' wives could never manage. Her past mistakes, we may assume, have been learnt from, and the fresh limelight brings no fear.

Another charming understatement

CARLA BRUNI: COMME SI DE RIEN N'ÉTAIT
***
NAIVE

NELSON Mandela had an agitpop song written in his honour, Lenin and Trotsky were namechecked in The Stranglers' No More Heroes, but could French president Nicolas Sarkozy lay claim to being the first politician to inspire an entire album of love songs?

Chronologically, it seems unlikely, given that his partner Carla Bruni's third album was mostly written by the time they embarked on their whirlwind romance, but the French First Lady has conceded that she "developed" one song, L'amoureuse (Woman In Love), an airy, mid-paced sashay in praise of love, after meeting Sarkozy.

Elsewhere, the album reprises the charming understatement that made her debut Quelqu'un m'a dit such a pleasant surprise. Her voice is, by turns, soft, silky and seductive, complemented by some lovely acoustic arrangements, sparingly embellished by harp, flute, clarinet, banjo and ukulele.

In addition to the album's love songs, including the lively, palpitating Ta tienne and the controversial Tu es ma came (You Are My Drug) which describes her lover as being "more lethal than Afghan heroin", she has penned a number of mostly wistful expressions of nostalgia and a sweet valediction for her brother, Virginio, who died last year.

She has also adapted an extract from Michel Houellebecq's La possibilité d'une île, transcribed a Schumann lied and covered a song in her native Italian and the standard You Belong To Me, popularised by Bob Dylan.

But the track which may cause Sarkozy some disquiet is the soft country rocker Notre grand amour est mort – that is, "our great love is dead".

FIONA SHEPHERD