The book, “L’Aube le Soir ou la Nuit,” nonetheless caused a stir here. While many French viewed their new president as a dynamic young leader bent on modernizing France, Ms. Reza described him variously as impetuous, irascible, sentimental, occasionally vulgar, frequently childish.
Now, eight months later, the book has been translated into English as “Dawn Dusk or Night” and was published in the United States on Tuesday by Alfred A. Knopf. Along the way, something peculiar has happened. Ms. Reza’s portrait of Mr. Sarkozy, 53, is the one that has stuck, lent credence by his taste for glitter, his divorce from one beautiful woman and hasty remarriage to another, his sharp tongue and his penchant for political action.
Another — perhaps apocryphal — life-imitates-art story from Paris comes to mind. “I don’t look like that,” Gertrude Stein is said to have remarked in reaction to Picasso’s 1906 portrait of her (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
“You will,” Picasso supposedly replied.
Ms. Reza, who likes to describe her book as “an impressionistic sketch,” has been surprised by what has followed its publication. “It is as if Nicolas Sarkozy stepped out of my pages and now leads his own life,” she said in an interview in her Left Bank apartment.
Yasmina Reza's new book on President Sarkozy of France, had some interesting tidbits: