In a new book that looks into Sarkozy’s relationships, 53-year-old Marie-Dominique Culioli has given a candid account of her marriage to him as well as condemned her friend Cecilia Ciganer-Albniz who later married him.

In an interview for the upcoming book, titled Sarkozy and the Women, Culioli has said that she has forgiven Sarkozy for the infidelity which led to their divorce but she’ll never forget Cecilia’s betrayal.

“Cecilia was my best friend. She did everything she could to win my friendship to get close to my husband,” The Sunday Times quoted Culioli as telling the book’s co-author Candice Ndlec.

“Nicolas is the father of my children. Many men have made mistakes and have fallen for temptation. (But) he was led astray by that girl. It’s that girl who made him fall for her,” she says.

Sarkozy married Cecilia in 1996. But he divorced the 50-year-old last year and subsequently tied the knot with Italian supermodel-turned singer Carla Bruni (40). Culioli, the daughter of a chemist from southern Corsica, met Sarkozy, then a newly elected councillor in the smart Paris suburb of Neuilly, while still a student at the Sorbonne in 1980.

A devout Catholic, she saw Sarkozy as “a spiritual person, very modest at heart” and helped him to build support in what was then known as the “Corsican faction” of the Gaullist party.

Two years after their marriage, Sarkozy presided as Mayor of Neuilly at the wedding of Cecilia and Jacques Martin, a television personality. Unbeknown to Culioli, he fell in love with Cecilia.

Culioli discovered that Sarkozy was having an affair in 1988 when the two couples went skiing in the Alpine resort of Megve. “Marie drummed on the door of Cecilia’s room. There was a sound inside. (She saw) Nicolas’s footsteps in the snow,” the authors write.

Culioli did not want a divorce and Sarkozy “went backwards and forwards between the two women”, according to the book. She had borne Sarkozy two sons, Pierre in 1985 and Jean the following year, whom she told: “One day your father will be President of the Republic.”