Are Sarko and Bruni to marry?

Rumours that Nicolas Sarkozy and his new girlfriend, model-turned-singer Carla Bruni, are about to marry have taken a serious turn. Yesterday's Journal du Dimanche newspaper reported that a ceremony has been provisionally booked for February 8 or 9 , and that the couple have exchanged gifts - an engagement ring for her, designed by Victoire de Castellane of Dior, and a Patek Philippe wristwatch for him.

The Journal is owned by Arnaud Lagardere, a friend of Sarkozy's, and is usually well informed about the President's plans. Furthermore, the Elysee Palace has made no effort to quash the wedding rumour.

If it happens, it will be the third marriage for him and the second for her: she has been the girlfriend of Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, but she's only been married once, to the philosopher Raphael Enthoven, who is the father of her son, Aurelien (on Sarkozy's shoulders, above).

The heightened talk of marriage comes as the French are getting a little fed up with their President cavorting on foreign trips with Bruni. So much so that Sarkozy's popularity rating has fallen, according to two opinion polls for French newspapers. Yesterday's Le Parisien showed a month-on-month drop from 55 to 48 per cent of voters saying they trusted him to run the country. Another poll in today's Liberation shows a two-points drop.

The Liberation poll finds that 63 per cent believe Sarkozy has been "too ready to put his private life on public display", refering to the President's high-profile holiday in Egypt with Bruni. The poll was conducted before yesterday's trip to Jordan when Sarkozy and Bruni posed for photographers holding hands.

The polls are not the only dampeners on the couple's romance. There are rumours that the President's former wife, Cecilia Sarkozy, has started work on a memoir of their tumultuous life together before their divorce in October. The nature of the project and the name of the publisher is being kept hush-hush by Cecilia; her last effort to produce a book - in effect, a long interview with the French journalist Valerie Domain - was halted when her husband, the then-Interior Minister, ordered the publisher to pulp it.