Like most of Europe, France is slogging through a recession and facing climbing unemployment. But president Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni, are in Mexico, staying at a $5,500-a-night beachfront villa. The honeymoon's over, reports the New York Daily News, and Bruni is suffering comparisons to another foreigner who married a French head of state: Marie Antoinette.
After Bruni attended a state dinner in Mexico City decked out in diamonds, one Frenchman lamented that "Sarko and Carla are back to acting like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette again."
(More Carla Bruni stories.)