Don't be surprised if "Freedom fries" are back on the menu at the White House, with Franco-American relations suffering a frisson after a hotly-disputed claim in a new biography of France's first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.
The authors of the new biography, Carla and the Ambitious, say that during a visit to the White House in March, Bruni-Sarkozy asked Michelle Obama what life was like as America's first lady. Bruni-Sarkozy recalled Obama telling her: "Don't ask. It's hell. I can't stand it."
A fine scoop, somewhat undermined by the quote being flatly denied by all the parties involved.
"The First Lady never said that," Katie McCormick Lelyveld, Michelle Obama's press secretary, said in a statement.
The French embassy in Washington DC also said the claim was false. "The words attributed to the First Lady of the United States were never said," said the embassy's spokesman Emmanuel Lenain.
"Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy distances herself completely from the content of the book Carla and the Ambitious, which was not authorised and the authors alone are responsible for its contents," Lenain told Politico.
It seems an unlikely tale, since the March visit of the Bruni-Sarkozys was not the first time the two first ladies have met (the other meetings being Pittsburgh in September 2009, France in June 2009 and Germany in April 2009), and it seems an unlikely question to ask at the fourth time of meeting.
Then again, to adapt Jean-Paul Sartre, hell is other people's books.
- This blogpost was amended on 17 September 2010. John-Paul Sartre had been misspelled.
