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If you are a man, you might be the kind who thinks Carla Sarkozy (née Bruni) is a goddess or the other kind of man - the dead kind.

But if you are the first, you will understand my chagrin at finding myself in an alleyway in the medina of Tunis when this famous and beautiful woman, on a state visit of which the French republic had failed to notify me, stepped into view not six feet from my nose, and my camera was back at the hotel.

"Your camera's back at the hotel, isn't it?" my partner had said only moments before, when we learned who was coming.

"Yes," I said.

"Well, don't worry," she said, and then, in case I might actually not worry, added: "She's only the most photographed woman in the world."

I had left my camera at the hotel so I wouldn't look like a tourist. What else I could look like - a grey-haired white person with no apparent business to conduct in the alleys of a rapacious North African marketplace festooned with objects of no use to any Tunisian or, really, anyone - was not an idea I had explored.

Waiting for Carla, I had time to explore it: A merchant with a stall full of little round boiled-wool hats had determined that I must have one, apparently because of a notice stamped on my forehead saying, "Buys hats."

Is it too much to say Carla has transformed the French presidency from an office occupied by bad-tempered trolls into one occupied by a guy who can't be that bad, because look at his wife? Generally I am not asked for sweeping political assessments, but you can kick that one hard and I doubt it will fall over.

In London, where sneering at France takes up every second other than those other than those spent buying houses in the Languedoc or Provence, Carla single-handedly elevated her husband's March state visit into a triumph that was marked, as one daily put it, by "acres of admiring British media coverage of his wife."

Reports hailed her as the "new Lady Diana." Carlamania splattered the press with pictures of Carla from which her husband had been cropped. So besotted was the country that it swallowed an April Fool's story cooked up by The Guardian claiming that Prime Minister Gordon Brown had hired Carla to show British women how to dress. Or for that matter, undress - 15-year-old naked snaps of Carla from her supermodel days popped into view.

So, 11 days ago, among the hats, it was Carla we were waiting for, not the President of France. In a teeming lane beside the Zitouna mosque stood a line of immaculately robed musicians holding tambourines and crooked horns. Along the passageway were other bands, and men were spreading crimson carpets on the paving stones. We positioned ourselves in an alley. A palpable sense of excitement rippled through the twilight air. Then the horns brayed and the tambourines went mad and a flicker of television lights came down the passage.

"Your camera's back at the hotel, isn't it?"

Nicolas Sarkozy came first, then Carla. She stopped in the opening of the alley and turned to face us. There was another couple, hateful people with a camera. Carla gave them what seemed forever. Her expression never wavered - a perfectly seraphic smile, eyes as blue and calm as a windless sea. I guess she'd held that gaze for every lens on earth that wanted it, and I, too, felt that it was directed straight at me. But it could have been the hat.

Matthew Hart is a Canadian writer based in London.