paris -- The president's wife has gone missing. And the question of the day in France on Friday was: Has she gone for good?
Cecilia Sarkozy didn't vote for her husband, Nicolas, in May; she didn't accompany him to lunch with the Bushes in Maine last summer; and the woman at Sarkozy's side at a celebratory dinner after France's quarter- finals victory in the Rugby World Cup a week ago? Not his wife, but one of her closest friends.
The chic former model, in fact, has done nothing official since Bastille Day in July. And this weekend she is reportedly at a $1,000-a-night spa in Geneva while he's in Paris rooting for France in the rugby semifinals.
On Friday, a journalist for the newspaper L'Est Republicain, citing sources close to the presidential palace, reported that the couple was definitely getting divorced -- something the rest of the media have hinted at but not quite said for weeks. "Where has Cecilia Gone?" Le Parisien asked last week.
The French are a tolerant people. Their presidents have had mistresses and even fathered illegitimate children and life went on. But divorce? How . . . conventional. How . . . bourgeois. How . . . unconventional, actually.
"But we are ready to accept a divorce at the Elysee Palace," Christine Clerc, a French "first marriage" expert and author, declared Friday in a phone interview. "In fact, it's the first time we can see it like this -- with our very own eyes. Before, the private lives of presidents were all hidden and many things were forbidden to be even discussed. Now we say, 'The first lady is gone.' "
About the only person who didn't seem to be letting go was the president.
Normally, first ladies fill in for presidents, but when this 49-year-old first lady backed out of an appearance on a popular TV show Sunday, it was the 52-year-old president who turned up, and brought the conversation around to his "fantastic wife."
"He seemed to be a husband trying to return his wife," Clerc said. "It was rather amusing and also tragic."
The Sarkozys have always had a less-than-placid relationship.
Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz, a onetime political aide, was married and had two small children when the two fell in love in 1987. Nicolas Sarkozy, then mayor of a Paris suburb, was also married with two children and passionate about politics. They moved in together, but it took several years of divorce wrangling for Sarkozy before they were able to marry in 1996. A few years later, after he became interior minister, he set her up in the office next to his as an aide-de-camp.
