Carla Bruni on music, love and Sarkozy

Rock gods have fallen at her feet. But now that she is married to Nicolas Sarkozy, is politics threatening to cramp Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s style? In her frankest interview yet, she sings her heart out .

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy strides out into the afternoon sunshine on her terrace and throws up her hands in welcome, shouting “John!” and kissing me on both cheeks. I’m taken aback: I’ve interviewed her twice in two years, but that was before she become France’s première dame. She is dressed in tight blue jeans and a plain white T-shirt, her wedding ring the only jewellery.

The Parisian home of the supermodel-turned-singer and wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy is tucked away at the top of a secluded alley in a chic area near the Bois de Boulogne. Policemen in plain clothes sit in two unmarked cars by a big rust-coloured door, which opens to reveal a large 1950s two-storey house with a garden screened by tall bamboos. The terrace is lined with Italian-style terracotta vases of olives and palm trees, as well as jasmine and a giant magnolia tree. She hasn’t moved out of her home, where she has lived for the past three years, since marrying Sarkozy in February; he lives with her here, and they hold family gatherings at the presidential Elysée Palace at weekends.

Carla immediately uses the familiar tu form of address, takes the bunch of flowers I’ve brought her and leads the way into her smart designer kitchen. Hitching a buttock onto the edge of a counter, she stretches to get a vase out of a cupboard. She fishes out of the fridge a small bottle of Mexican Corona beer for herself and a Perrier for me, says “See you later” to the two publicists from her record label, and walks through to the sitting room. She perches bolt upright on a slate-grey pouf, facing incredibly tall french windows that give onto the terrace. Nearby is a black grand piano and behind her is a modern fireplace with an ornate 18th-century gilded mirror, from the castle in northern Italy where she spent her summer holidays as a child.

I’d thought she might not feel up to the interview, which is to promote her third album, Comme si de rien n’était (As If Nothing Had Happened). The previous afternoon, at a farewell ceremony at Tel Aviv airport, security guards rushed her and Sarkozy into their plane after an Israeli guard reportedly shot himself in the head about 200 yards away. Bodyguards also ushered the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, and prime minister, Ehud Olmert, into bulletproof cars.

But Carla appears unfazed. “I just saw the security guards come quickly up to us,” she says in her husky voice. “One said to me, ‘Madam, you have to run into the plane.’ I was a bit shocked, but I wasn’t afraid. I looked back to see where my husband was. I ran up the stairs because they were pushing me. It’s only afterwards that I found out what had happened.” Does she worry that the guard used her and her husband’s presence as a backdrop for his suicide? “No, I don’t think so. When you take your own life, there’s something much more vast at stake.”

The 40-year-old seems to be taking this, and the rest of the sea change she jokingly calls early in the interview “the apocalypse”, in her stride. The clues to her ability to accommodate dramatic change lie in her early childhood, in what she refers to as her “ruptures”. Carla was born to a musical and wealthy family in Turin, in northern Italy. Her mother, Marisa Borini, was a concert pianist, and Alberto Bruni Tedeschi, who she thought was her father (more later), was a composer, a tyre-making industrialist and an art collector. Alberto also headed Turin’s Teatro Regio, the main concert hall, and guests at the castle in the Po valley, rich in ancient frescoes, old masters and even Chinese ornaments, included Maria Callas, Artur Rubinstein and Herbert von Karajan.

When Carla was seven, the family – her sister is Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, the film director; her brother, Virginio, a graphic designer, died last year of cancer – fled to Paris. The parents feared a kidnapping by the Red Brigades terrorists plaguing Italy at the time. Carla says she was too young to feel any fear herself. She sees the move as her life’s first rupture. She says the word in French; it’s also the word Sarkozy uses to describe the new dawn he promises France. “That’s helped me, because every time I’ve had to make a rupture, a big change, I have the memory of that move to Paris. I got used to change at an early age. It wasn’t a bad memory, because I was very close to my grandmother, who was French, so I was going somewhere where I had roots,” she says.

A year after the move, a teacher gave her class a guitar lesson. Carla mimes strumming a guitar, sings “Oh, Susanna/Oh, don’t you cry for me,” then explains: “That’s what she played for us. There was a guitar at home and I spent the next two days working on that song. I didn’t do my homework until I got it right. I realised I’d found my gateway into music, and I’ve played the guitar ever since almost every day.”

At the age of 19, a new rupture. She stopped studying art and architecture at the Sorbonne to start modelling. “I just brought my underground Metro pass to an agency – it was the only photograph I had. They took me.” She became a supermodel, the face of Guess and Versace, earning an estimated $7.5m a year in a 12-year career. She says: “Modelling taught me right from the start that I and my image are two different things. That helps me a lot today.”

In 1996, as Alberto, the man she had seen as her father, lay dying, her mother told her that her father was in fact Maurizio Remmert, an Italian businessman and guitar-player with whom Marisa had a six-year affair, and that Valeria and Virginio were her half-siblings. Carla insists that this, which she kept secret until January this year, was not a traumatic revelation: “For me it was a relief, a gift. I felt relieved, the way you feel when someone explains something to you. In any case, the man who brought me up is still very present in my life. What did trouble me was that it all came out when I got married, and when it’s written up by other people it’s always a bit ugly. But this is a beautiful story.” Carla was 19 when she met Remmert, who was told she was his daughter when she was born; Alberto was also told at the time. The meeting, Remmert says, was “natural and calm. Our relationship is very healthy”. They talk often on the phone, and Carla invited him to her wedding.

She stopped modelling at 29, feeling her career was on the wane and frustrated at being surrounded by ever-younger “little girls”. Her career as a singer had just as fantastic a start as her modelling career. At first she didn’t have much faith in her own voice, though she had plenty in her lyrics and thought of offering them to others. When she did make a demo recording, wary of record labels rejecting her simply because she was an ex-supermodel, she sent it anonymously to the Paris independent label Naïve. Her first album, the 2002 folk-rhythm Quelqu’un m’a dit (Somebody Told Me), sold 2m copies. Four years later, the album No Promises, inspired by poems by W B Yeats, Emily Dickinson and Dorothy Parker, sold 400,000.

Her private life, or what she calls on her latest album – using the past tense – her ability “to make men waltz”, has fed gossip magazines. They called her a femme fatale, tracking her relationships with Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger (the latter lasted for seven years), the actors Vincent Perez and Charles Berling, and the Socialist former prime minister Laurent Fabius. She told an interviewer in February 2007: “I’m monogamous occasionally, but I prefer polygamy and polyandry. Love lasts a long time, but burning desire, two to three weeks.” Falling in love with the married Raphaël Enthoven, a philosopher, prompted more scandal, as she was previously with his father, the publisher Jean-Paul. Raphaël divorced his wife and had a son with Carla, Aurélien, now seven. “Before having Aurélien, I was a bit of a tomboy, obsessed by doing things and travelling,” she says. “My son slowed me down, because he is more important than me. For me, femininity means making room for a son or a husband, and I didn’t do much of that before.” Does she love differently now? “Certainly. There’s a time for youth and a time for maturity. You can’t remain a bambina [little girl] all your life.”

Her separation from Enthoven in May 2007 was “like a divorce, even if there had been no signature on a piece of paper”. “It was an amicable separation. Splitting up as lovers is sad enough, but when there’s a kid involved, you’re separating a family. For me it was like a death in the family – plus my brother had died.” She turned back to her music a month after the separation, starting to write the songs for her third album. She continued taking singing lessons, twice a week, as she has done for the past 15 years. She used to lose her voice when she felt moved by something – “That takes the biscuit for a singer!” – but the lessons have long overcome that.

When the advertising and public-relations guru Jacques Séguéla, who had masterminded election campaigns for the late Socialist president François Mitterrand, invited her to a dinner party at his house in Marnes-la-Coquette outside Paris last November, Carla accepted immediately. She was eager to meet people and make new friends, and although she is politically on the left, she was “very curious” about meeting her “not-so-blind date”, the centre-right Sarkozy, who had divorced his second wife, Cécilia, also an ex-model, a month earlier. Six months into his presidency, Sarkozy had told various friends, including Séguéla, that he wanted to meet new faces, and Séguéla thought it would be good for him to meet Carla; each knew the other would be there and they were the only singles at the party.

Did she really say before meeting Sarkozy, “I want a man with nuclear power,” as one book about their relationship claims? She replies: “I never said that. I didn’t even know he had nuclear power, poverino [poor man]. I found out afterwards. How sad to have nuclear power: it means you might use it.”

Carla was seated at table on the president’s right. “My first impression of Nicolas, and I still have that impression, was of a very magnetic man, with very rare intelligence and energy,” she says, clenching her fists on the last word. “The impression I had when I met my son’s father was fraternity and kindness; perhaps that’s why it was easy for me to have a son by him. With my husband, it’s magnetism and complementarity. I’m pretty bewitched by him; plus I’ve always liked to talk with my friends or the few men I’ve loved, and with him it’s a conversation without end, whether we’re at home or on an official trip to Israel.”

Carla has said in the past that she always took the first step with lovers. At the dinner, Sarkozy first politely apologised to Séguéla’s wife, who was sitting on his left, to turn towards Carla and talk to her all evening. So Sarkozy took the first step? “I did too. I talked to him. It was pretty much love at first sight.” When the evening ended, she asked him if he had a car and he deposited her at her door. From the next day he is reported to have wooed her assiduously, sending her text messages, flowers and gifts.

She recalls that when Sarkozy asked her to marry him soon after they met, she joked about him having married twice. “What’s this, is it a tic, a habit you’ve got?” she said. “But I understood he was a man of commitment. He starts down a road and he goes to the end of it. I accepted immediately.” What made her decide to marry? “I’d never felt the need to formalise a relationship that way before, but falling in love with him was for me a total commitment. We both love life, we’re not conventional in a certain way – he’d married before and I loved adventure – and we have our love in common. He protects me, not from his world of politics, which is a very tough world, but from all the rest; not because he’s president of the republic, but because he’s protective by nature.”

But she did lose sleep over her decision. “This wasn’t only about marrying the man I love. The man I love is the president, and I feared this would have an impact on all my acquaintances, not just professional but also my family. I was also concerned that my son should love this man and this man should love my son, and that worked immediately. Aurélien is lucky, because he has no wicked stepmothers or stepfathers. The other night when we were in Israel, he stayed with Raphaël and his girlfriend, Chloé. He’d got a rash from some nettles and she took care of him all night.”

Carla, who has said that all the men she has loved had a strong feminine side, didn’t hesitate to say that Sarkozy was no exception. “My husband, who is so, so man in a certain sense, has a very feminine sensitivity. A man can have feminine values, he can be super-sensitive, without being feminine. Nicolas is very sentimental. That’s rare for a man in his position. Feelings are the most important thing in his life. Of course he’s ambitious – he wouldn’t have got where he is without that – and he’s a hard worker, but I think his three sons are his absolute priority. If he’d spent all his life thinking only of his political career, he wouldn’t have children who are so happy, well balanced and intelligent.”

Sarkozy has three sons: two by his first marriage – Pierre, 22, a rap producer, and Jean, 21, a politician – and Louis, 11, by his second. Carla says that Aurélien is very fond of Louis. “Earlier today, Aurélien got a medal in judo and he first called Raphaël, then Nicolas, who’s a black belt. Nicolas was in a meeting but took two minutes to speak to him and say, ‘Well done.’ ”

Carla has admitted to putting a foot wrong a couple of times since meeting Sarkozy. She has regretted that paparazzi photographed Aurélien on the president’s shoulders during a New Year holiday in Jordan. And she publicly apologised to the left-of-centre magazine Le Nouvel Observateur after she compared it to publications of the Vichy regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany. Her comment was prompted by a report that eight days before her marriage, Sarkozy sent a text message to Cécilia, his ex-wife, which read: “Come back and I’ll cancel everything.” Both Sarkozy, who sued but then withdrew his suit, and Cécilia have denied this.

She is still feeling her way around her new role as first lady. “I mustn’t change myself,” she says. “But there is something I’ve learnt for myself in this new role, and that’s prudence. Before, when I gave interviews, I had a lot of fun cracking jokes. But a joke looks very different when it’s printed in a newspaper. I still have a laugh in everyday life, but otherwise I’m cautious about what I say. It has an effect on my husband, on public opinion.” On his popularity, which is in the doldrums? “Not so much his popularity as the task he’s undertaken, which is an important one. I don’t want to interfere with it. I love him.”

Carla is clearly thrilled by the warmth of the reception she got on her visit to Britain in March. Before the trip, France’s first state visit there in more than a decade, she worried she would “not be up to the mark”. She asked the wife of the British ambassador to Paris for advice on how to behave with the royal family. “I’m not used to this kind of thing,” she explains. “It’s difficult to please the British; they are a very demanding people, and they were a bit scandalised by my previous life. But they understood that I could pass from one life to another.” There were more raised eyebrows on the day of her arrival on British soil, with two British newspapers splashing on their front pages a full-length nude photograph of Bruni taken 15 years earlier by Michel Comte which was to be auctioned by Christie’s (it fetched £46,000). How much did that upset her? “It didn’t upset me. I worried that it would be bad for my husband, but I feel no shame for my past. I’m proud of everything I’ve done.” She pauses for this to sink in – she means everything, including her private life. “It’s a picture that was originally taken for an anti-Aids campaign,” she continues. “It’s true that when I was a young model, I didn’t have problems doing pictures that were a bit naked as long as they were artistic. I never did soft-porn photographs – I don’t have the body for it,” she laughs.

What impression did the British make on her? “I must tell you that I adore the British, because they’re eccentric, they’re very traditional and at the same time they’re very original. The British are very special: you can see it in their art, their films, their poetry. For example, the protocol of the royal family is fantastic – it’s very rigid and at the same time it’s very calm. The royal family make being with them very easy because they are so considerate; they talk to you with huge kindness. The Queen and Prince Philip spoke perfect French, they explained everything about Windsor, the history of the castle, what the coats of arms on the walls were, why some had been painted in white – it was because the nobles were traitors.” The Duke of Edinburgh proved an attentive host. “Prince Philip showed us to our bedroom. He told us it was the room in which his mother and his grandmother were born. All these things were fascinating. They made the protocol much lighter to bear, and they helped me to enter their lives.” Carla praises the Queen as “an exquisite person. She is everything you would imagine of a queen, and I don’t know if there are still people like that in the world”. What in particular had impressed her about the Queen? “Her intelligence, her perfect French – and she looks so well.” Sarkozy, Carla relates, asked the Queen at one point: “Majesty, do you ever feel tired?” The Queen replied in French: “Of course I feel tired, but no one can see it.” Carla enthuses: “That’s courtesy, that’s good upbringing, because she doesn’t impose anything on you despite the important position she has held since her youth.”

I mention the way newspapers rounded on Sarah Brown’s dress sense, comparing it unfavourably with Carla’s. Carla sticks by the prime minister’s wife: “Sarah is a very elegant person; her style is classic. I’d prepared myself to go to London; I wanted to honour Britain and France. I was the outsider going into Sarah’s world, so she could dress normally. And Sarah hasn’t done 12 years of modelling like me, so she doesn’t go looking for clothes like I do.”

Asked what she thinks of British men, she says: “I like the British very much because they accept their femininity. I adore Monty Python. I adore this thing that comes from the theatre of centuries ago, of Shakespeare, where the roles of women were all played by men. I think this idea of dressing up as a woman is great fun. A Frenchman or an Italian would never do this.”

Carla’s music is a source of stability and comfort in helping her weather the biggest rupture of her life. She lists “my music, my family and my friends” as helping her cope. The title of her latest album, As If Nothing Had Happened, is both a tribute to a photograph by her late brother, Virginio, and a nod to the way she has tried to stick to her musical career, and beyond that to her life as she knew it pre-Sarkozy. The music itself is a throwback to the folk rhythm of her first album, but much more varied, stretching from waltzes to blues and slow rock.

Both her mother and her sister live in Paris and she sees them often. Valeria once told me: “I’ve asked her to read film scripts to see what she thinks, and she’s asked me about her albums. I can say just what I think to her.” Marisa often steps in to help look after Aurélien.

Carla usually writes her songs at home in the evenings and has several dozen notebooks stacked on a bookshelf in her study. “But I can write anywhere. I can write very well in your sitting room if you and your wife invite me – I don’t need anything more than pen and paper,” she says. She jumps up, rummages among the neat piles of books that cover the vast coffee table, retrieves a big blue notebook of the kind French schoolchildren use, and comes and sits down next to me. “Look,” she says as she rifles through the pages covered in blue ink, “this is the notebook most of the songs on the album come from. Sometimes it’s just the first few lines. I’ve numbered them, I wrote 43 in all; most of them I haven’t used, but I can go back to them one day.”

She reads No 39, Ta tienne (roughly, Your Yours): “There are some who bite/There are some who crack…” I ask about another part of the same song: “I so much want/To be yours/That I draw a line…/Over my career as an Amazon/And over my sovereign freedom.” Is that the real you, I ask. She laughs: “Right at the end I cry out ‘No!’, so yes, I’m completely independent. Writing about something is a bit like freeing yourself of it, so this song is mischievous. Let’s say it’s about meeting someone and wanting to possess them, but that’s an illusion love creates. I’m completely independent, completely independent,” she repeats firmly. She’s up again, back to the pouf and another cigarette.

Her sister, Valeria, once told me: “I envy the independence Carla has in her love stories.” What made her say that? “Valeria has always been very sentimental and romantic, a deep person. I’ve been for many years obsessed by joy and high spirits and having fun and change. I’ve had a few great loves in my life, not many, because you don’t get many great loves in your life. I needed to live 40 years and to find the right person before maturity gave me access to a kind of love that I would say is more complete. That’s why I got married.” What of the words in the same song, “Watch out for yourself because I’m Italian/I’m going to put the ladies off/I’m going to muzzle the beautiful sirens”? Surely she’s not the jealous type? “You’re right, I’m not that jealous or possessive, but if the man I love becomes crazy about another woman, of course I’ll become jealous and possessive. I’ve never had my husband followed!”

She has described her songs as “lullabies which envelop you like a caress”, but they are even more intimate, seductive – and occasionally raunchy – than that. From Je suis une enfant (I Am a Child): “I am a child/Despite my 40 years/Despite my 30 lovers.” From Ta tienne: “You’re my lord, you’re my darling, you’re my orgy.” I ask her which lyrics she has changed since meeting Sarkozy. “I’ve changed nothing, nothing. I just added one song because there were 13 before and Italians think 13 is tremendously bad luck. Look, I’m doing the sign of the corna [horns],” she says, bending down to touch the parquet with her outstretched index and little finger to ward off the evil eye. “I didn’t change the lyrics, because I’m convinced that censorship would kill even a small creation like mine.”

How did her marriage affect the album? “For me there’s no difference between this one and the first two. The big change is not for me but for other people, for the media, because they don’t distinguish between my position and my work. I don’t mind that, because I understand it’s difficult to make the distinction. I have no problem separating the two, but I’ve changed nations, language, homes a thousand times. I’ve changed my work twice.

“So dividing myself isn’t a problem. It’s a problem for others, because as [Henri] Bergson says,” she adds, quoting the 20th-century French philosopher, as one does in Paris, “people see the label more than the individual, and as the label isn’t precise, it confuses people.” But surely falling in love with a president affected the making of the album in some way? “My problem was that I had less time than before because I got married. That’s not because my husband is president of the republic – any woman who gets married at the age of 40 to a lawyer or a doctor or whatever would feel the same thing. Plus I have a son; time became shorter when he was born because he has priority over me; he has priority over everything.”

Her husband has helped her with the album “like any husband should. He’s been good and kind and generous”. She adds: “It’s not easy being with an artist, because there are hours of doubts. My husband, poor thing, doesn’t have an easy job – he’s got a whole country on his shoulders and what’s more, he has to put up with me.” She doesn’t mind people laughing about Sarkozy being her fix in the song Ma came (literally, My Dope). “That’s fine, I’m happy people have something to laugh about. The truth is that this is a song about being addicted to love. Ma came is a slang expression in France; if someone says ‘Tu es ma came,’ it means ‘You’re my cup of tea.’” She says the last words in perfect English with just a hint of an American accent.

I ask if she has ever taken drugs herself. “No, never. I lost several friends even when I was still at school, so I know that drugs are an infamy, they mean destruction and tragedy. I like wine, but alcohol is a drug, cigarettes are a drug – legal drugs are dangerous enough already. Wine and alcohol are dangerous because they’re artificial ways of living. What satisfies me is reality.”

There are several references to time passing and to death in the album. She sings in Le temps perdu (Lost Time): “Against the marble of our tombs/Let’s take all our time every second.” I tell her she seems a pretty cheerful soul for someone who sings about death. “Being anguished about death, and knowing time goes by so fast, actually make me cheerful. I don’t want to go into psychobabble, but I’m not serene and I’m not wise. I never have been. I hope I will be with maturity, but today I’m not. The truth is, life raises questions I haven’t found the answers to.” Such as? “Why are we here? For how long? What happened before?” Does she need to know the answers? “No, I don’t need to know the answers, but I’m not happy-go-lucky enough. I’ve been asking myself those questions since I was small.”

There will be one big question for her to answer after the summer holidays, which she will spend with her husband partly at his official retreat, the fortress of Brégançon on the Riviera, and her own family villa nearby: what is she going to do with her new status? She has said she wants to dedicate herself to humanitarian causes – the sales of her album will go to the charity Fondation de France – so I ask if the late Princess Diana inspires her. “Yes, I admire Diana for bringing something human into the monarchy, in that she couldn’t bear to lose her love. That’s rare: usually people in that kind of position put their role first and pretend everything’s fine. Diana inspires me as an example: she brought her simplicity and her humanity to important issues like the effects of landmines on civilians.” She remembers, at the age of 28, meeting Diana briefly at a charity fashion show. “I gave her some flowers. I just remember a very young, very beautiful woman. She was already a legend.

“Today I’d like to help people. I have this album now, so it looks as if I talk only about myself, but before writing another one I’d like to use the position linked to my husband, which is so unique and privileged and which opens doors, to help people. We’re very fortunate, and my parents always taught me that when you’re fortunate you have to do something for others.” What specifically does she want to do? “I receive 40 dossiers a day, so I have to read them first. I may back something which already exists or create something myself. I want to dedicate my energy, myself, my image and my position to fighting ignorance, poverty and injustice. But I won’t do anything political.”

Of course, she has already done something “political”. She has won over the French, with 68% of voters approving of her in one opinion poll. Political analysts are divided over how much she has improved Sarkozy’s image – only around 40% support him – but many agree on the “Carla effect”: her fiery husband has turned more serene and sensitive. Surveys show the couple must remain discreet not to irritate voters; a brief but high-profile trip to the Pyramids early in the year prompted many to complain that the president was spending too much time on his private life rather than dealing with the nation’s problems. That was the only sign that the French didn’t like the impact of the relationship, and it has since been forgotten.

I ask how she feels at the centre of the “apocalypse”, as she calls life after meeting the president. “I feel like a brick in the wall, just a small brick.” She repeats the words, this time singing the Pink Floyd refrain. She adds: “I feel like a woman in love with a man who brings her into a universe that she doesn’t know, but he himself is in love with a woman who brings him into a universe he doesn’t know either. So it’s an effort for him as well.”

I read out something that Jacques Séguéla, who brought the couple together, has said: “Carla has brought the president grace, elegance, international culture; she makes his trips more presidential.” Carla smiles: “Thanks, Jacques, very kind. I hope to bring to Nicolas gentleness above all, a refuge.” She makes a sweeping gesture with her hand, indicating her home. “Love is always a refuge. Even if one of the lovers is a singer and the other is a president.”

However many changes there have been in her life, she has no doubt that this latest one is for ever. Parisians may gossip about how long her love for Sarkozy will last, but she has said that her marriage is “for good”.

As I get up to leave, she leans forward closer to the tape recorder and sings just three words in a breathy imitation of Marilyn Monroe: “Bye bye, baby…” Then the first lady, or singer, or ex-supermodel, or simply Carla – there is a choice of labels – bursts out laughing.

Carla Bruni’s new album, Comme si de rien n’était, is released tomorrow by Dramatico Entertainme

A star is bared: how Carla first seduced the camera?

As she arrived in Britain to meet the Queen, a nude picture of Carla Bruni hit the newspapers. Michel Comte, who took it, praises the ‘natural, polite’ model who started sitting for him at the age of 16. Kathy Brewis reports

Michel Comte is an impatient man, full of driven energy. “I like people who do something. Not people who sit around. I hate to waste my time. I hate to waste five minutes.” Switzerland’s most famous photographer talks like a businessman but looks like a beatnik. He wears faded blue jeans, beads, chains and navy velvet shoes. His rugged face and lean body place him anywhere between 40 and 60 (he is 54). His face is serious, bordering on grouchy; his smile comes as a pleasant surprise.

He is notoriously difficult to pin down, rarely gives interviews. As we start talking he flicks through a huge folder of thumbnail images of his work. This seems to be his way of dealing with discomfort; once he gets going he talks candidly. “William and Harry – they are good in their own skin, don’t you think? The girlfriends are not so pretty.”

The calming influence is his Japanese fiancée, Ayako, who sits by him throughout. They met on Mount Fuji a year ago and are getting married in two weeks’ time (ceremony in Zurich, party at Angkor Wat). She listens quietly as he muses over the curious fate of Carla Bruni, whom he has photographed since she was 16. “It’s interesting to see the power behind a powerful man, you know? I see what Ayako brings to me: it’s incredible. And I am not a powerful man.” She places her hand on his knee. “Women are much stronger than men. How far will he go? He’s not a man with a lot of friends. That’s what’s going to be interesting.”

Comte first photographed Bruni for Italian Vogue. “I went to her house often: I knew her mother and her father. They’re a very intellectual family. Not superficial at all. I was on contract with Chanel and we took the Concorde together all the time. She was just modelling because it happened. She had success, she made money and she had fun. She was one of the greatest.” What made her special? “Everything she did was natural. There was nothing fake about Carla. And she was very polite. She opened doors for people, carried her own bags. She was never spoilt. She was always a lady, even when she was very young.

I never thought of her as a teenager. She was a good girl. Very uninhibited. Very honest.” He objects to her being labelled a man-eater just for having a few boyfriends. “She was incredibly generous to them. They were long relationships – two years, three years. Always very intense. She was never one to run around from guy to guy. She was loyal to them. She dragged them around all over the world. Every fashion show, her boyfriend was there backstage. Wherever she went. Except when she went out with Mick [Jagger], which she kept in the closet.”

Comte met Bruni’s new husband three years ago. He’s not the sort of “cool guy” she has gone for in the past. “Physically it doesn’t make very much sense. He’s not the most handsome creature I’ve ever seen.” And then he poses the question everyone is asking: “Will the situation be permanent, or will it be another limited Carla thing? She definitely didn’t marry him because she needed something, I can tell you that: she’s got it all.”

Comte is in Zurich to shoot some commercials, but travels constantly.

“We are in Cambodia from September until next spring, and in Tibet, and outside of Paris, and in the States at the end of next year, and South Africa.” Though he is known for his glossy fashion spreads and celebrity portraits – Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore, Mike Tyson, Michael Schumacher – recently he has done an equal amount of photojournalism, bringing back reportage from Bosnia, Darfur and Cambodia. He has raised money for an HIV hospice in Los Angeles. He is building a university for the Dalai Lama near Dharamsala, north India.

He is full of anecdotes about people he has known. He has travelled with the Clintons, he has met Obama and the Bush family (“for good or for bad”), even Osama Bin Laden (in Afghanistan before 9/11). He is president of the Michel Comte Water Foundation, which delivers clean water to poor communities, and which benefited from his auctioned nude of Bruni, which went for £46,000 in April. He is making two feature films at the moment: one about the Khmer Rouge trials, one on Tibet. “They are totally political, controversial. They will make me an incredible amount of enemies, but also some friends. It’s a choice you make.”

His mother’s side of the family is Jewish and they lost relatives in the Holocaust: no wonder he is passionate about humanitarian issues. He built a 400-bed hospital in Kabul in 1999 after his first visit to Afghanistan. He shamelessly plunders his contacts, getting them to donate. He lived in the Ritz for years, maximising his connections. “It all connects. It’s a network of people. Gianni Versace was incredibly generous when he was alive. Roberto Cavalli wrote me a cheque for a million dollars.”

Comte picked up his first camera when he was five or six, and would have been David Bailey’s assistant in London but his father recalled him to Switzerland to do something sensible. He began to train as a doctor but switched to art history and architecture, then worked as a picture restorer. His big break was in 1979 when Karl Lagerfeld commissioned him to do an advertising shoot for Chloé.

He has two sons from his first marriage, who are 21 and almost 15. “Practically grown-up. Very artistic. They’re both bad boys. Good bad boys.” As was he: at school, he once removed the windows as revenge on a teacher who had treated a fellow pupil badly. “They had to teach in the cold.

I did the craziest things, but there was always a reason.” He describes himself as dysfunctional. “I cannot use a digital camera, I cannot use a computer, I can barely pull a light switch.

“I always feel like I haven’t done anything,” he says. “That’s why I keep doing things.” What is his approach? “I’m very direct and I’m quick. I don’t let people think about what picture will result. I shot eight short films yesterday with 40 people, and they don’t even notice what’s happening. I’m quiet and I don’t hesitate. I don’t give people warning.” Yet he is camera-shy himself, having only taken one self-portrait. “I don’t know where it is. There are very few pictures of me around and I hate most of them. I’m reclusive.”

He last photographed Bruni 18 months ago. “She came to the studio with her guitar, like a little gypsy girl.” He finds her new image “a little radical. I’d have loved to see her a little more casual. She could get away with it. She doesn’t need to be married to the president. She can do it for as long as she wants. For me the interest is what this woman can make out of that man. Their story could be amazing, or it could turn into something mediocre. Which would be a pity. Because she’s not mediocre at all”.