(Guardian) Hours after Nicolas Sarkozy's office said neither he nor his ex-wife would discuss their divorce, France's former first lady went public. "I met someone, I fell in love, I left," she said of her decision to start a new life with an events organiser in New York in 2005. A year later she returned to her husband in time for his presidential campaign. She told L'Est Republicain she wanted to "behave correctly ... to try to rebuild something". But she added: "We tried everything, I tried everything. It just wasn't possible any more."
Ms Sarkozy - yesterday compared in the French press to Princess Diana and Marie Antoinette - said she sought a quiet life "in the shadows", despite posing alone for a new set of official photographs.
She said her husband's relationship with fame and political power was "like a violinist who has been given a Stradivarius, suddenly he has the chance to practise his art ... It's not the same thing to me".
She hinted at a year of emotional torment during the election campaign. She did not vote in the final round of the election because she wanted to hide away.
Asked at the EU summit in Lisbon about his divorce, Mr Sarkozy said: "I was elected by the French people to solve their problems and not to comment on my private life, and I would have liked a major newspaper like Le Monde to show a greater interest in Europe than in my private life."