The French are a tolerant people.

It is said that truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes truth is funnier than fiction, I guess. I read an article about Sarkozy, President of France, today. And this is very impressive.

The French are a tolerant people. Their presidents have had mistresses and even fathered illegitimate children and life went on. But divorce? How . . . conventional. How . . . bourgeois. How . . . unconventional, actually.

This part tells you about French people. Plus, the first sentence might be difficult for English learners in Japan.

People is plural when it refers to human beings in general or to many indivisual human beings together; but when people refers to a particular racial, ethnic, or national group, it's singular, and the plural is peoples. (Collins Cobuild Advanced Dictionary of American English)

English teachers in Japan often give their students this example:

- The Japanese are a hard-working people.

Let's get back to Sarkozy and his wife. How they have been since they met each other is described below:

Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz, a onetime political aide, was married and had two small children when the two fell in love in 1987. Nicolas Sarkozy, then mayor of a Paris suburb, was also married with two children and assionate about politics. They moved in together, but it took several years of divorce wrangling for Sarkozy before they were able to marry in 1996. A few years later, after he became interior minister, he set her up in the office next to his as an aide-de-camp.

But in 2005, she ran away with another man to New York for eight months. While she was gone, he took up with another woman only to dump her to lure Cecilia back.

One more ESL stuff. Japanese people tend to think that "in" is the only preposition that comes after "absorbed" because they have been required to memorize "be absorbed in" as an idiom. However, in this article, we can find "by."

"She saw him as completely absorbed by politics, unbearable to live with," Clerc said, "and I think she wanted more."

It often happens that learners' choices of prepositions will be restricted by the instruction they have had before, especially when "be + past participle + preposition." I call this "The rule of 'be surprised at.'"

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-sarkozy13oct13,1,7855575,print.story?coll=la-headlines-world&ctrack=2&cset=true