I know most of you don’t care about Carla Bruni-Sarkozy or her pregnancy, but I’m still very, very interested. Carla is apparently due in less than two months, and I believe she’ll be the first French First Lady to have a newborn in the presidential Palais de l’Élysée in decades, right? That’s exciting, to have a leader who is still having babies with his latest wife. I kind of admire Sarko for letting it all hang out in his personal life. Anyway, Carla has given a new interview which is making big headlines. You will not find Carla waxing poetic about how empowered she is or how babies are the only thing that gives her life meaning. No, Carla finds meaning in her true loves, cigarettes and liquor (and wine). And she can’t wait to get back to her true loves.

Like many heavily pregnant mothers-to-be, Carla Bruni says she is desperate to give birth. But the French First Lady has confessed that her urgency is not driven simply by the desire to see her bundle of joy in the flesh. She is also desperate to start drinking and smoking again.

Miss Bruni, 43, admitted that, after nearly eight months of carrying her first child with President Nicolas Sarkozy, she is ‘totally fed up’.

She said yesterday: ‘Quite frankly, I can’t stand it any more. I spend most of my time either sitting down or lying down. I can’t drink or smoke any more. I’m in a hurry to get it over with.’

The baby – due in six weeks – will be Miss Bruni’s second child. She has a son, Aurelien, born in 2001, with ex-boyfriend Raphael Enthoven.

‘The baby will be viable at any time from October 1,’ the former model told French newspaper Le Parisien. ‘Aurelien arrived on time, which means this could be a long wait, but I really do want this child so much.’

Friends of Miss Bruni told the paper that because she was having a baby after the age of 40, her doctors had urged lots of ‘rest and clean-living’.

The French First Lady has also insisted she will not release photos of the new baby, saying it’s ‘a totally private event’.

However, France’s Marianne news magazine suggested the birth was ideally timed for Mr Sarkozy’s re-election campaign next year, describing the baby as the ‘perfect marketing tool’ for the 55-year-old president.

It wrote: “Politically speaking, the timing of this pregnancy is perfect. It is a ‘marketing-baby’ that will be born just before the last months of presidential campaigning really get going.”

Bruni and Sarkozy met on a blind date at a Paris dinner party in November 2007. They married just three months later at a private ceremony in the Elysee Palace on February 2, 2008.

Sarkozy, 55, already has three children of his own – two sons, Pierre, 25, and Jean, 23, from his first marriage to Marie-Dominique Culioli, and a 13-year-old son Louis from his second marriage to Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz, who he divorced in 2007.

[From The Mail]

I don’t doubt that Sarko will be helped by the baby – he’ll look younger, vital, vigorous. At least that’s the conventional political wisdom in America, although… I worked on a campaign once where the candidate was a father to a newborn, and many voters said that the fact that he had such a young baby at home dissuaded them from voting for him, because they didn’t think he had any business running off and leaving his wife with the bulk of the child-rearing.

As for Carla and her dreams of (presumably) breastfeeding while sipping on a glass of wine and sucking on a cigarette… well, I’m just amused that she was so honest.

Photos courtesy of Fame & Pacific Coast News.