Interactive Timeline: Sarkozy's first year in office
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It was a year ago, shortly after midnight, crushed between too many men with sweaters tied around their necks near the centre of a jubilant crowd in the Place de la Concorde, when I encountered a 24-year-old university student named Céleste Le Tallec, who was staring at the stage with tears streaming down her face.
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She was engrossed by her new president, bouncing on his toes as he delivered his victory speech — "I will not betray you. I will not lie to you. I will not disappoint you."
His puggish frame, shorter than Napoleon Bonaparte's, was dwarfed by that of his wife, Cécilia, who had suddenly materialized on stage beside him, a secular miracle after she had vanished from his side in the final weeks of his campaign. She waved to supporters; he stood on his toes, half a metre away, and declined to touch her or make eye contact.
Ms. Le Tallec, along with millions of other citizens, had jettisoned her traditional support for the Socialist Party because she had been moved by Nicolas Sarkozy's rhetoric of change — "a fundamental rupture," "a France for those who get up in the morning," "the purchasing-power president."
That promise of a new, revved-up France, governed by a man who seemed to be constantly jogging on the spot, led Mr. Sarkozy to be elected by a majority of female voters, despite an opponent who would have been France's first female leader.
Mr. Sarkozy is a president who has been defined, from the start, by the women at his side. To understand the strange transformation of the French President, after only a year in office, from saviour to charlatan to man of mystery, it is best to examine the astonishing group of women who have accompanied him.
Cécilia
That Sunday night a year ago, Mr. Sarkozy's sculpted, intellectually acute and emotionally aloof wife set the tone. Nicolas was a new sort of Frenchman, a child of immigrants and grandchild of Jews whose entrepreneurial, street-thug bearing seemed a total break from the distant, fatherly hauteur of every leader since Charles de Gaulle.
Cécilia was the New Frenchwoman — independent, volatile, willing to contradict her husband, often dominant in the relationship. For years, she was his chief political adviser, regarded by all as the source of political sanity in his schizophrenic milieu.
On that giddy Sunday night on the edge of the Seine, Ms. Le Tallec and her friends talked of a French Camelot, Cécilia's Jackie to Nicolas's JFK, or perhaps the other way around.
"Together, we are going to write a new page of history," the President told them, and they wept some more. Everyone was a believer.
A year later, when I call her up, the tears of joy are gone. Ms. Le Tallec has a job in the new Sarkozy economy, selling bandwidth on a satellite system, but she has lost her faith in the man. "So much has happened in the past year, but none of it was what I had hoped for," she says. "Now, I look at him and I wonder how this can be the face of France."
Millions of others seem to agree: Mr. Sarkozy has plummeted in the opinion polls, reaching a low usually reserved for the end of a president's third term, not the beginning of his first.
Ms. Le Tallec turned her back for good on the mood of May, 2007, when she learned that Mr. Sarkozy would be welcoming Canada's own Celine Dion, his favourite singer, to the Élysée Palace next week to be anointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour alongside fashion designer Giorgio Armani.
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