The moment he leapt up the steps of the Elysée Palace five months ago，Nicolas Sarkozy set about giving the French presidency a facelift. Out went the formal，remote style of his predecessor，Jacques Chirac. In came an open，regular-guy approach. The elegant Sarkozy family posed Kennedy-style for the cameras on investiture day. Mr Sarkozy invited trade unionists to lunch and “victims and heroes” to his Bastille Day garden party. The message was clear：he was a young，modern president in touch with the lives of ordinary people.
　　Little did the people know how intimately they would be in touch with his. Over the past three weeks，the usually reverential French media have crawled over his divorce from Cécilia，which was officially announced last week. It has been splashed on all the magazine covers and chewed over on broadcast talk-shows. “Desperate housewife”，screamed one headline，in English，in Libération，a left-wing newspaper. Paris-Match this week devoted a 16-page cover story to the subject. Mrs Sarkozy herself even joined in，giving Hello-like interviews—“I met someone else， I fell in love”—to the press.
　　Why then this media frenzy over the divorce， the first in France's top job since Napoleon divorced Josephine in 1809 Part of the answer is precisely the perils of presidential transparency. But there is something else，too：the cult of celebrity. The French may consider the Sarkozys' divorce of no political consequence，but they are lapping up every last twist in the drama. Indeed，American-style celebrity news is thriving. In 2001-06，when overall press circulation dropped by 8%，that of the celebrity press jumped by 22%.