Carla Bruni looks back on her awkward meeting with Charles III and Camilla

A year after their meeting in 2007, Carla Bruni and the former President of the Republic Nicolas Sarkozy already flew together to England, during an official trip. Accompanied by his new wife, singer and model who became first lady, the head of government was to meet the son of the late Queen Elizabeth II – who died in 2022 – and his wife Camilla, both then Prince and Princess of Wales. “This state visit is quite a story,” she recalled in the columns of Vanity Fairin the June issue.

“The very day we arrived, the British press went wild by publishing an old photo of me, naked, taken by Michel Comte (a Swiss artist, Editor’s note), which had been sold at auction for the fight against AIDS,” explained the interpreter of Someone told me to the magazine. The portrait in question, captured in 1993, is a well-known image in the work of the photographer and his muse. Carla Bruni appears standing there, completely undressed, her hands hiding her penis. Faced with the onslaught of tabloids, Charles III and his wife then rushed to put their guest at ease by apologizing. “When I got off the presidential plane with my husband, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla were waiting for us at the bottom of the gangway steps and said to us: ‘We are very sorry for the newspapers…’,” he said. -She keeps.

After the scandal of this photo, which was a little too daring for the Anglo-Saxons, the former presidential couple has fond memories of their stay in the United Kingdom. “We slept in Windsor. We arrived at the entrance to this small town, the queen was waiting for us, there was an all-white carriage pulled by eight white horses in which I rode alongside Elizabeth II,” Nicolas Sarkozy recalled in 2022 , on the set of the show The Grand Chessboardbroadcast on France 3. His wife was in another carriage “pulled by eight black horses, with the Duke of Edinburgh (Philip of Edinburgh, the Queen’s husband who died in 2021, Editor’s note). When she came down, my heart was beating, first with feelings and then with pride. With her little hat on my head, I said to myself: ‘We’re in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and when she curtsied, I would have married her a second time.’

Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni met during a dinner organized by advertising executive Jacques Séguéla in November 2007, and got married on February 2, 2008, fourteen years ago. A birthday that the singer and model did not fail to celebrate with a “thank you Nicolas Sarkozy”.