No matter how you drop a cat, it lands on its feet. “I’m a cat,” declares Carla Bruni. “You know, cats don’t like to go outside. They actually drop their smell all over a place, and that becomes their place. So when you live with a cat, you actually live at the cat’s house.” Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, whom Bruni—singer-songwriter, model, and male fantasy extraordinaire—married in 2008, shortly after he was elected, knows that. All during their marriage he has resided at her house, in Paris’s 16th Arrondissement, with a living room filled with a piano and recording equipment. “You can’t leave a dog alone for a week—it suffers,” she continues. “A cat is not exactly the same. It suffers from leaving the house and likes to be alone in a warmer place, like me.” Dressed down in jeans and projecting a remarkably feline air herself, Bruni is talking with me on the occasion of the release of her fourth album, Little French Songs. She actually undulates her lithe body, imitating a cat on the prowl: “He likes to adapt himself to the situation, and he never breaks anything—ashtrays, glasses, bottles.” She is puffing mint and pawing the vapors released from an electronic cigarette. “My cat walks on the piano—poof, poof, poof. I like this suppleness. I don’t see why we should resist situations. I think adaptability is a major point for anyone.”

That is certainly true for Bruni, who at 45 has had six or seven lives already. Born in Turin into a very rich industrialist family, she was brought to live in France as a little girl and was told only at the age of 28, as her father lay dying, that he was not her biological parent. Her real father had been a young classical guitarist, also from a wealthy Italian family, who toured with her mother, a concert pianist twice his age. By 19, Carla was a sought-after model, and along the way she acquired languages and millions of frequent-flier miles. She was featured on 250 magazine covers. For seven years she was seen off and on at exotic locales with Mick Jagger, while he was married to Jerry Hall, and she gained a reputation as a female Don Juan, picking and choosing among artists, politicians, and intellectuals. Five and a half years ago, not long after being dumped by the handsome, younger philosopher Raphaël Enthoven, the father of her now 11-year-old son, and facing 40, Bruni met Sarkozy at a small dinner party. The president, alone and miserable in the Élysée Palace since his second wife, Cécilia, had left him for the New York event organizer Richard Attias, was enchanted by the little French songs his new acquaintance breathily crooned to him after dinner. For the next few months, explosive headlines documented the lovers, first on a carefully staged outing to Disneyland Paris, where paparazzi snapped them, followed by a trip to the ruins of Petra, in Jordan, where he wore jeans and Ray-Bans, cementing his nickname in the press as President Bling-Bling. Sarkozy and Bruni wed on February 2, 2008, just in time for her to meet the Queen of England as France’s official First Lady.

I last interviewed Carla Bruni for this magazine shortly after their marriage, in her Paris living room. We were alone, without handlers, and she seemed ruffled only once, when I brought up the fact that the press was reporting that Sarkozy had given her a pink-diamond engagement ring identical to the one he had given Cécilia. At that point she excused herself to get another Diet Coke. For this interview we were in a chic and ornate hotel near her house, and her publicist and close friend from her fashion days, Véronique Rampazzo, stayed in the room but off to the side, with her back to us. This time again, Carla would excuse herself once, to wash her hands when she needed to figure out how to answer an uncomfortable question I asked her about one of her new songs, which appeared to make fun of her husband’s successor.

That week headlines were blaring in France, and the fireworks surrounding the former president were threatening to overwhelm the media blitz organized to launch Bruni’s first album in almost five years. After Sarkozy, who had run far to the right, lost the election, last May, to the Socialist François Hollande, he declared that he was through with politics forever: “C’est fini.” Today, no longer protected by presidential immunity, he is facing inquiries or allegations on five different fronts, including a polling scandal in which the Élysée allegedly gave millions of euros in non-competitive contracts to close pals of the president’s in order to sound out the French electorate on several questions, including whether Sarkozy’s relationship with Carla Bruni was an issue that affected the public. (Of those polled, 89 percent said it was a private matter.) His supporters want voters to believe that these probes are politically motivated, particularly since Sarkozy has said that duty might force him to reconsider his decision to leave politics, inasmuch as Hollande’s poll numbers are at a 30-year low for a president, unemployment—which stands at 10.8 percent—is at a 14-year high, and anxiety among the French is running rampant. “Nobody knows where the country is going,” the journalist Christine Ockrent told me. Even though the next election is four years away, Sarkozy can’t, or won’t, get off the stage and leave the limelight to his wife.