Carla Bruni:"Love lasts a long time, but burning desire, two or three weeks."

About the Elysee Palace. (Palais de l'Élysée, located 55, rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris.
The building has a long and colorful history as well as its occupants,including the new one,Sarkozy,the actual president of France.
He declared openly that he is not an intellectual,so bringing Carla into the fold maybe a chance to add some flair to politics and a change in fact.We all need Panem et Circenses. After all life is short and to achieve harmony in this insane world we must have Bread,Love and Fantasy!
The Elysees was the former address of Madame Pompadour,here in a painting by Francois Boucher.[French Rococo Era Painter, 1703-1770-noted for his pastoral and mythological scenes, whose work embodies the frivolity and sensuousness of the rococo style.-)It was bought by Louis XV for her when he made her the Marquise de Pompadour. She was born Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson on December 29, 1721 in Paris. It is suspected that her biological father was the rich financier Le Normant de Tournehem, who became her legal guardian when her official father Francois Poisson, a steward to the Paris brothers--foremost financiers of the French economy--was forced to leave the country in 1725 after a scandal. He was cleared eight years later and allowed to return to France.
Besides being the mistress of Louis XV ,she was a beautiful and intelligent woman.She had many enemies among the royal courtiers, who felt it a disgrace that the king would thus compromise himself with a commoner. She was very sensitive to the unending libels called poissonnades, a word meaning something like "fish stew", a pun on her family name, Poisson, which means "fish" in French.

Madame de Pompadour was an accomplished woman with a good eye for Rococo interiors. She was responsible for the development of the manufactory of Sèvres, which became one of the most famous porcelain manufacturers in Europe and which provided skilled jobs to the region. She had a keen interest in literature. She had known Voltaire before her ascendancy, and the playwright apparently advised her in her courtly role. She also discreetly endorsed Diderot's Encyclopédie project. After the War of the Austrian Succession, when economy was the thing the French state needed most, she drew more and more resources into the lavish court. Her influence over Louis increased markedly through the 1750s, to the point where he allowed her considerable leeway in the determination of policy over a whole range of issues, from military matters to foreign affairs.

Her memorial portrait finished in 1764 after her death, but begun from the life, by her favorite portraitist, François-Hubert Drouais

Pompadour was a woman of verve and intelligence. She planned buildings like the Place de la Concorde and the Petit Trianon with her brother, the Marquis de Marigny.
information adapted from Wikipedia