LUNCH AT ELYSÉE: SARKOZY'S HIGH-BROW CHARM OFFENSIVE French President Nicolas Sarkozy is stuck with an approval rating below 30 percent. Will his weekly lunches with the cream of Paris “civil society” help change his image?

PARIS - Last Wednesday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy had a lunch date scheduled with a journalist and two writers. Up until that morning, the guests, political chronicler Eric Zemmour, writer Denis Tillinac and novelist Yann Moix, had imagined that between military intervention in Libya and the rise of the far right in local French elections, the president would be too busy to attend. But Sarkozy arrived on time, relaxed, smiling, and even informal, “as if we were meeting in a restaurant,” said Tillinac. Over the last six months, the president has regularly met with writers, intellectuals and artists, never once cancelling one of these dates. It’s his time to relax and unplug. These meetings are a chance for Sarkozy to seduce those who arrive imagining him uncultured, but come away praising his “youthfulness”, “energy” and “simplicity”. They are Sarkozy’s way of penetrating the Paris elite that hold their nose up to his controversial politics, but continue to watch him with interest and curiosity. Patrick Besson, writer and chronicler from the weekly news magazine Le Point, who was one of the guests a few weeks ago, amusingly sums up these moments of presidential recreation: “I had felt like I was his gym instructor, without the gym ”. Last Wednesday, the three guests were also joined by former politician Alain Carignon, who despite spending several years of political scandal and prison, has remained a close friend of the head of state. It is Carignon, alongside presidential advisor and former journalist Catherine Pégard, who has been responsible these past few months for bringing this slice of Paris, regarded by those in power as representative of “civil society”, to the presidential Elysée palace. Pégard, keen to get an eclectic mix of guests, has invited authors like Marc Dugain, Alexandre Jardin, Dominique Bona, as well as François- Guillaume Lorrain the cinema critic for the weekly newspaper Le Point, and historian Evelyne Lever.