Classic Carla, queen of the quick change
A touch of jetlag? Listening to her husband speak
Blink and you could have missed them.
No, not the French presidential entourage, but the various outfits worn by Nicholas Sarkozy's impeccably-dressed wife, who managed four different looks during her husband's first state visit to Britain.
Carla Bruni's smart dress provided a contrast with the already-famous naked image of her during her modelling days which was embarrassingly released to co-incide with the couple's visit.
The visit, which took in Windsor and Parliament, proved to be a long day for the newly-married Mrs Sarkozy, who appeared to nod off while her husband spoke in the Palace of Westminster.
However, she was on top form when meeting the Queen and Prince Phillip, who evidently enjoyed meeting the former fashion model.
Bruni's pert pillbox hat was perfect. Poor Camilla looked like a pheasant crash-landed on her head...
Not since Anne Boleyn has a woman curtseyed so deeply, so demurely or so calculatedly before a British monarch.
When Carla Bruni-Sarkozy swept in to London to meet the Queen yesterday on her very new husband's presidential jet, she was part Grace Kelly, part Jackie Kennedy, part Princess Diana.
But let's not fool ourselves. France's First Lady was only ever playing a part.
Carla arrived in a long, demure, soft-grey Christian Dior coat, flat black suede pumps, matching Dior handbag and leather gloves.
Some were surprised that a former supermodel - famous for bedding rock stars and a voracious sexual appetite - was so, well, covered up.
But if you had appeared naked, as she had, in almost every television bulletin and newspaper in Britain that morning, you'd want to cover up, too.
Road kill? Camilla in her unfortunate choice of hat. Dressed to kill: Carla in her soft-grey Dior coat
It might have been a 15-year-old modelling picture being opportunistically auctioned at Christie's, but it did rather remind one that this was a girl with a past. One hell of a past.
The heiress to a tyre company had a long-running affair with Mick Jagger while he was married to Jerry Hall, as well as relationships with Eric Clapton, Donald Trump and Vincent Perez to name but a few.
In the end, Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy landed on our shores looking quintessentially French, even though she's actually Italian aristocracy.
In a very short space of time she has mastered the transformation from rock chick to chic - and she pulled it off before the most unforgiving audience in the world.
She was as demure as a virgin bride, which she is anything but. On arrival, her hair was softly curled and crowned with a tiny, perky, pert cap, half-pillbox, half beret.
Perfectly poised: Carla Bruni takes a seat in Westminster in her patriotic Dior ensemble, including a pair of Dior logo pumps. The outfit was created for her by British designer John Galliano who heads the Dior couture house in Paris
Carla's patriotic pumps: the little Dior logos on Carla's black patent shoes
It worked magnificently on two levels, as a mark of respect to the Queen's predictably jolly millinery concoction and also to her husband.
Perched as it was on the back of her head, it offered no extra height to embarrass Monsieur Sarkozy who, at 5ft 5in, is nearly half a foot shorter than his wife, even when she's in flat shoes and he's in stacked heels - as they were yesterday.
We were all wondering how the Amazonian Carla would manage to avoid overshadowing her diminutive husband, but she did it with some aplomb, slinking down the steps of the private jet as though it were a catwalk, walking ahead of her husband and always ten inches below him.
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Nicolas Sarkozy says he wants Carla to be the Gallic Lady Di.
And indeed, just as Diana stood on a lower step next to her fiance Charles for their official engagement pictures, so Carla dipped and deferred.
Just as Diana learned the tall-wife stoop so as not to overshadow her husband, so Carla dropped her head and her shoulders as she stood behind the President for the official photographs.
And then there were those curtseys!
She dipped and dazzled, shook hands and shimmied, smiled and flirted like a courtesan.
Even the way she dropped her head while shaking hands with dignitaries, as if in deep respect, came to look more like a premeditated ploy to appear shorter than the President.
By 4pm, when she reappeared for Sarkozy's address to the joint Houses of Parliament, Carla had already had three changes of outfit - though apparently it was still all Dior.
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Only an aficionado would have noticed, though, as each outfit was more grey and demure than the last.
Eagle-eyed observers noted rather charming little Dior logos on her patent black shoes.
For a woman much criticised back home for her drab, black ensembles, Gallic grey and French chic was quite an improvement.
And grey is the colour for spring. By now, her hair had been up and down more times than the London Eye.
While all this was a triumph of understatement for Carla, spare a thought for poor Camilla.
Imagine waking up yesterday and knowing this was the day your picture would be splashed across the world's media alongside a former supermodel.
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Style triumph: Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy landed on our shores looking quintessentially French, even though she's actually Italian aristocracy
In the end it looked as though she had given up hope, dressed in what appeared to be an aged cleaning lady's old brown coat, and topped with a hat that looked like a beret upon which a dead pheasant had crash-landed.
With wild feathers sticking out in every direction, that wasn't a hat, it was roadkill.
Yet despite this, Carla has more in common with Camilla than she ever will with Princess Diana.
Neither woman's past bears too close a scrutiny when it comes to fidelity.
Yet both took the ultimate prize - one to be the First Lady of France, the other the future Queen of England.
But like Anne Boleyn before her, you couldn't help but feel that in Carla's case yesterday the fabulous frocks were not clothes but costumes, the smiles beguiling but borrowed, the bravura performance just that, a performance.
Even seated on the platform for her husband's address to Parliament, she sat poised and posed like a mannequin, her chin resting on one elegant finger extended contemplatively as she devoured every word, her face perfectly angled for the cameras.
President Sarkozy said he wanted a warmer relationship with Britain, that we should be "brothers in arms".
I suspect when it comes to Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy, the sisterhood here is still keeping an open mind.
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