Paris:
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy declared on Thursday that rumours about the state of her marriage to France's President Nicolas Sarkozy have no importance and are not part of a plot against them.
The French first lady was responding after several European newspapers reported rumours about the couple's private life, and after Sarkozy aides had alleged that unnamed forces are behind a deliberate smear campaign. "These are insignificant rumours that count for nothing. We have never tried to fight them. These are rumours that are unpleasant, but which have no importance," she said, in an interview with Europe 1 radio.
"I don't think that we have been victims of any kind of plot. I think that rumours have always existed, that unfortunately they're part of being human," she explained, in her first public response to the scandal. "We have decided, my husband and I, to not accord any importance to this. There is no plot. There will be no revenge. It's of no concern to us, and we turned the page on this a long time ago."
Bruni-Sarkozy was asked, why - if there was no plot - did Sarkozy's communications advisor Pierre Charon endorse a police investigation and suggest that foreign business interests were behind the rumours. "Pierre Charon spoke with the urgency of friendship. He took it very much to heart. He took it more to heart than we did," she replied.
French spies tried to track down the source of rumours about the stability of President Nicolas Sarkozy's marriage, the head of the domestic intelligence agency has said.
Asked about the rumours - which became headlines in the European press outside France after surfacing on blogs - DCRI chief Bernard Squarcini confirmed that specialists had been asked to identify their source. "My department was tasked by its commanding authority, national police chief Frederic Pechenard, in early March," Squarcini said, shortly after first lady Carla Bruni said the rumours were "insignificant".
"We worked on it until the judicial inquiry began," he added, referring to a complaint lodged by the Sunday newspaper Journal du Dimanche, a complaint which triggered an inquiry against a blogger who posted on its site.
Longstanding rumours about the stability of the presidential marriage went mainstream last month when a blogger working for a firm subcontracted to the newspaper published the rumours, since denied. The blogger and his employer, the chief operating officer of the content provider Newsweb, have since lost their jobs.