French president speaks of his wife

This photo records the joyous homecoming of the Bulgarian nurses from a weird and frightening place, Qaddafi Land, whose reigning principles don't necessarily include logic, law and humanity:

This later photo reveals a star participant in the event, an airliner labeled République française:

Don't look around in the crowd for a French lady named Cécilia Sarkozy, described this morning by a French newspaper as "distant, cold, reserved, rebellious, independent, elegant, and today conquering and celebrated". She didn't want to stay in Sofia for the inevitable hollow praise. Soon after the nurses came home, accompanied by their Palestinian doctor friend [now a citizen of Bulgaria], Cécilia Sarkozy took French leave of everybody.

The wag who said that François Hollande looks and behaves like a delicatessen proprietor was unkind—not only, you might say, to delicatessen proprietors—because he's really quite a smart and likable guy... otherwise the Socialist party wouldn't have made him their chief, and Ségolène Royal wouldn't have made him her companion. Be that as it may, François Hollande couldn't find words bitter enough to express his horror at the idea that the legitimate wife of President Sarkozy might have played a significant role in the release of Qaddafi's hostages. But, instead of examining Hollande's dull gibes, let's listen to the words of Cécilia's proud husband.

A problem has been solved. Full stop. There's no point in theorizing about a new organization of French diplomacy, or the status of the wife of the chief of state, or some other reasoning. They had to be evacuated. We evacuated them. That's the only thing that counts. It's time to inject pragmatism into international problems, as in purely national problems. Cécilia did a remarkable job. It was a question of women. A humanitarian problem. I felt that Cécilia would be capable of performing a useful act. She did so with lots of courage, lots of sincerity, lots of humanity and lots of brio, by understanding immediately that a key to success was our capacity to take into account the sufferings of everybody: those of the nurses, of course, but also those of the fifty families who had lost a child. Cécilia's sensitivity enabled her to perceive the situation perfectly.