Carla Bruni’s third album, “Comme si de rien n’était” (“As If Nothing Had Happened,” for you silly English kniggets), will be hitting the stores in France this Friday. It’s Carla’s first artistic effort since she rose to the lofty post of First Lady/presidential hose monkey, but she hasn’t let her exalted public position cramp her songwriting style. In fact, some of the numbers are downright steamy. There’s already been a bit of controversy over “Ma Came” (“My Junk”), where Carla tells her lover “You are my drug/ More deadly than Afghan heroin/More dangerous than white Colombian.” Hard to imagine Laura Bush expressing sentiments like that. Or, for that matter, singing anything like “Ta Tienne” (“Yours”), the song she wrote for Sarkozy: “tu es mon seigneur, t’es mon chéri…” Oh, let’s just go with the English:

You are my lord, you’re my darling
You’re my orgy
You’re my folly, my mix
You are my blessed bread
My charming prince
I am yours…

If you’d like to hear that in French, sung in Carla’s sexy, breathy whisper, just go to Carla’s website, where the entire album can be heard for the next two weeks. Carla stayed home from the G8 summit to promote the new album, a decision which displeased the Japanese and, strategically speaking, seems like an utterly boneheaded move. Just by appearing with this woman at his side, Nicholas Sarkozy reduces every other male official in the room to the status of a sniveling, third-rate power.