LA NOSTALGIE DU BOUT?  The municipal gardeners are hard at work trashing bedraggled remnants of the holidays, while the semi-annual sales hysteria has calmed down to a few pairs of outlandish shoes in barren shop windows.  Yesterday was Ash Wednesday: to dust we will return.

Did President Sarkozy, recently on a campaign to return Catholicism to a more central place in French culture (comment reserved) take his new wife to Mass with the masses and receive the ash-smudge on the forehead?  As the world knows ad nauseum, following perhaps six weeks of a flamboyant affair like a made-for-TV movie with maximum product placement, Nicolas just married ‘in strictest secrecy’ the mediocre singer/fashion model Carla Bruni.  She comes with a string of additional tags: Italian, age 40, left-wing supporter of Sarkozy’s rival, physically at least a close ringer for Cecilia who is ex-Madame Sarkozy #2 (and described by the Prez as ‘the woman of his life’ less than a year ago) a richissime heiress (although blithely not her father’s daughter) and not so incidentally an unabashed–oh, what’s the word?  The press has tried ‘free-spirited’,  ‘emacipated’ even ‘libertine’..  Their readers prefer ‘unserious’ ‘unsuitable’ or even ‘used-up’.  What they all mean is: slut.

If Carla but knew how passionately the Immigrant has been defending a woman’s right to have a little lie-down wherever she likes!  A bas with the perfidious double standard–hasn’t Nicholas been around the block himself, a few times?  But as the list of ‘linked names’ grows ever longer, like a sort of Pinocchio’s nose of dalliances, to include such a yucky lapse of taste as Donald Trump, and as Sarko’s approval rating hits the skids, reflecting a bizarre lapse of political and perhaps personal judgment–the Immigrant’s heart for the cause is starting to tire.

It’s a lot more fun and uplifting to stump for Obama.