Justine Lévy, the French author of "Nothing Serious" (titled "Rien de Grave" in France,) a thinly-veiled fictional account based on Ms. Lévy’s bad encounter with husband-stealer Carla Bruni, whom she calls "The Terminator."
“On Wednesday evening, Sept. 21, 2005, the designer Diane von Furstenberg hosted a cocktail party in honor of Justine Lévy, the author of Nothing Serious (titled Rien de Grave in France), a roman à clef based on Ms. Lévy’s recent, sensational personal life.
Ms. Lévy, 31, is the dewy daughter of the French celebrity-philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, and her book whipped up quite a scandal in France, illuminating certain universal truths about men, women and sex, and even jostling The Da Vinci Code from the best-seller list in the process.
…Ms. Lévy had a rather tragic encounter with the supermodel-cum-chanteuse Carla Bruni—the Angelina Jolie of Europe.
Ms. Lévy was married to a rising philosopher named Raphaël Enthoven, who was the son of her father’s best friend, Jean-Paul. She had a late-term abortion at the insistence of her career-obsessed husband and went through a messy two-year addiction to amphetamines.
That was before Ms. Bruni arrived on the scene. Ms. Bruni had somewhat of a home-wrecking reputation and was credited in the press with causing Mick Jagger’s split from his wife. In 2003, she remade herself into a pop singer and won the 2004 Victoires de la Musique in France.
Carla Bruni sings at the 2004 Victoires de la Musique in France
She was also, at one point, the mistress of Ms. Lévy’s father-in-law. She dumped the father for the son [Raphaël], shattering Ms. Lévy’s Raphaël Enthoven Jr. were married and have a son, Aurélien, born in 2001.]
Carla Bruni, former husband Raphaël Enthoven, and their son, Aurélien, circa 2003-2004
Nothing Serious, …published … by Melville House, is a fictionalized version of this story, with characters thinly disguised through pseudonyms. Of the Ms. Bruni–type character, the book’s femme-bot ‘Paula,’ Ms. Lévy writes:
‘I thought she was beautiful and dangerous with that immobile face, as if sculpted out of wax, when she smiled her bones sort of moved to reveal her teeth …. I thought she was beautiful and bionic, with the look of a killer,”’referring to her as the ‘Terminator.”
…(of Bruni, Lévy said):
‘If I see her, I kill her.’ “(1)
(1) Kolhatkar, Sheelah. “It’s A Chattefight As Novelist Levy Nips Carla Bruni”. The New York Observer, October 2, 2005.
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