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Sarkozys 'tried everything'
19/10/2007 09:56 - (SA)
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| Cecilia and Nicolas Sarkozy walk on the beach in Arcachon, southwestern France in this 2006 file photo. (Bob Edme, AP) |
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Nancy, France - Cecilia Sarkozy said in an interview published on Friday that she and French President Nicolas Sarkozy "tried everything" to avoid their divorce but found it impossible to live together any more.
The president's wife admitted she had fallen in love with another man in 2005 and left Sarkozy but insisted that she had returned with the intention of "trying to rebuild something".
Cecilia Sarkozy, who has rarely been seen with her husband since he took office in May, said she had just wanted to keep out of the public eye because she is "someone who prefers the shadows, serenity, tranquility".
"What happened to me has happened to millions of people: one day you just don't have your place in the couple ... it does not work anymore," she said in the interview with the l'Est Republicain newspaper the day after the couple's divorce "by mutual consent" was announced.
"The couple is just no longer the essential part of your life. It does not function any more, it does not work any more," she said.
"We tried to reconstruct, to rebuild, to put our family before everything else, this recomposed family which all the French people talk about, to make it the priority, but it was not possible. We tried everything, I tried everything. It simply was not possible."
Cecilia Sarkozy said she was not cut out to be a president's wife.
"I had a husband who was a public man, I always knew that, I accompanied him for 20 years," she said, describing Sarkozy as a "formidable" head of state.
"But this is not for me. It is no longer for me.
"For a year I tried to commit myself professionally, personally, but it did not work every day," she said in a bid to explain her much noted absences from ceremonies around the presidential election, including her failure to vote in the second round.
Her motive, she explained, was "to not show oneself, not expose oneself, to protect oneself".
The couple, who were both on their second marriage, had one child together, Louis, aged 11. They also had two children each from their previous marriages.
Cecilia Sarkozy ran away from her husband for several months in 2005 to be with an advertising executive in New York. The couple reconciled in 2006 but Nicolas Sarkozy broke with French political tradition by acknowledging the difficulties in the marriage.
- AFP
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