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PARIS - The French media is crammed with election coverage but has published, or broadcast, hardly a word on the topic that most obsesses the Paris media-political village.
Just over a week before the second round of the presidential election, a legally-enforced code of silence surrounds the state of relations between the frontrunner, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his wife, Cecilia.
Cecilia Sarkozy, 49, briefly split with her husband two years ago and then returned amid great public fanfare. She voted with Sarkozy - and presumably for Sarkozy - in the first round of the election.
This was the first time that she had been seen on the campaign trail for two weeks. Cecilia Sarkozy has since disappeared from public view once again.
When they voted on Monday at Neuilly-sur-Seine, a wealthy Paris suburb, relations between the couple seemed, at the very least, strained. Reports of another serious rift in the Sarkozy marriage have been the object of constant, lurid speculation - even songs - on the French-language internet over the last fortnight. Stories have been published in the British press and other foreign newspapers, suggesting that Cecilia Sarkozy has again left her husband for another man - in the midst of the most important campaign of his life.
A source within Sarkozy's party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), told the Independent that it is now "generally known" that there had been a further rift in what had once seemed to be a perfect, power marriage. The source suggested, however, that the rift might once again be temporary.
In almost any other democratic country in the world, a split between the presidential frontrunner and his wife in mid-campaign would be explosive, headline news. Not in France. Under French law, it is illegal for the media to discuss private lives, even those of public figures. The law also applies to foreign publications which circulate in France.
The law is well-intentioned but can have perverse effects. Sarkozy's allegedly fragile and hyperactive personality is at the centre of the second round campaign. He is the favourite to defeat the Socialist candidate, Segolene Royal, on May 6. If his wife has left him at such a sensitive time, does the public not have the right to know?
For 14 years, the French media hid the fact that the late President Francois Mitterrand had a second family and an illegitimate daughter, Mazarine.
In one of the few articles to appear on the "Cecilia mystery" in the mainstream French press, Daniel Schneidermann, the media columnist in Liberation, asked why the French media had not been "inoculated' by the "Mazarine" experience. "A wife leaving the marriage has far more serious consequences, both physical and psychological, than some extramarital affair," Schneidermann wrote. "[Sarkozy's] wife even had her own office at his campaign headquarters."
Liberation's columnist also complained that the "Pravdaisation" of the French press had gone even further. Without mentioning the rumours that Cecilia had disappeared, the magazine Paris Match - owned by a group belonging to a friend of Sarkozy - published a picture spread this month headlined "Revoila Cecilia" (Cecilia is back again). The pictures showed her at a charity gala in Paris. There was no sign of Sarkozy.
Guy Birenbaum, a publisher and political commentator, who has published books on the cosy relations between politics and the media in France, told the Independent: "The Sarkozy marriage is obviously a legitimate question for the French media. They ignore it not really because of the law but because they are afraid and because there is a deference towards power."
- INDEPENDENT
