Ms. Bruni, for her part, has said that “love lasts a long time, but burning desire, two or three wee

Ms. Bruni, for her part, has said that “love lasts a long time, but burning desire, two or three weeks.” She is monogamous from time to time, as she remarked to the magazine Le Figaro Madame. “But I prefer polygamy and polyandry,” she said.




Can Indian officials invent protocol to accommodate a First Sleepover Pal? Will the French public accept a woman who espouses polyandry, has a son by a philosopher whose father she once also dated, and who has been romantically linked with Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger?

For starters, she is a stepdaughter of an Italian tire magnate and classical composer, Alberto Bruni Tedeschi, who is married to her mother, Marisa Borini, a concert pianist. She is rich and well educated (in France, where her family moved in the 1970s to escape a wave of kidnappings in Italy) and speaks three languages.

ARM CANDY Carla Bruni and Eric Clapton at a benefit for rain forests about 1992. Her name has also been linked with that of, among others, Mick Jagger
Ms. Bruni on the catwalk for Yves Saint Laurent in Paris in 1995.