That sound you hear is the collective grumble of eligible bachelors in France and the world beyond. As in,"Really? Him?" Former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn's personal and legal travails are a secret to no one—save perhaps the jurors he might one day face in a Bronx court in the civil suit brought by Times Square Sofitel chambermaid Nafissatou Diallo. Still, according to the French glossy magazine VSD, Strauss-Kahn has a new girlfriend.

"DSK, He is Forgetting Anne With Another ... Exclusive Revelations," Thursday's edition of the weekly splashes in yellow caps across its cover. VSD's "revelations" come a week after Anne Sinclair, Strauss-Kahn's wife of 20 years, confirmed in so many words to the daily Le Parisien that the couple had finally split. (The same daily had, in fact, only ten days earlier run a story interviewing merchants on the posh Paris plaza where the Strauss-Kahns shared an apartment, headlining, "The Place des Vosges Wants to Forget Strauss-Kahn.")

Last week, Sinclair, who runs France's iteration of The Huffington Post, implicitly confirmed the break-up in an answer about her life after Strauss-Kahn. "I'm in good form, I took some holidays, I'm back working hard, I'm deep into the American elections. I've always had a very strong link with my six children [two from her first marriage and Strauss-Kahn's four from previous unions]. And I'm doing very well, thank you."

VSD's alleged revelations on Thursday are, in fact, kept to a minimum. The magazine cover's photo and another inside—paparazzi-style pictures taken from a distance—of Strauss-Kahn, exiting an apartment building, his arm around the shoulder of a woman whose face is obscured, are the only ones showing Strauss-Kahn with his imputed new squeeze. Others show a woman called Myriam, a petite "effervescent forty-something" whom the publication claims is unmarried and works in television. The tone is flowery. "Has Dominique found in Myriam the woman who will finally make him renounce his old demons?" the magazine asks. "In any case, the couple appears happy and it shows. Tender gestures, kisses on the neck, romantic candlelight dinners, rendezvous in Paris." The magazine claims the couple spent an August weekend in Corsica and that, in her company, "DSK has become a gentleman again."

Indeed, no matter the state of DSK's manners, or whether the mystery woman in his company is in fact a new flame, the front-page revelations stand as new proof that in France, nearly 16 months after his presidential ambitions collapsed catastrophically in a New York hotel suite, Dominique Strauss-Kahn still sells. Les Strauss-Kahn, a book on DSK and Anne Sinclair by two Le Monde journalists, was a summer bestseller.

And, although it has yet to begin shooting, the top-flight French stars set to feature in a high-profile DSK movie have effectively been promoting the project since last winter, every new comment eagerly picked up by French media. Bronx-born director Abel Ferrara's forthcoming project starring Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Adjani is poised to focus on the former couple's private torment. In an August interview with France's Journal du Dimanche, Adjani said, "It should be fascinating because there is a director who isn't French in charge and he will go where it hurts. With him, there is no risk of being politically correct."

Strauss-Kahn and his alleged new girlfriend might then want to skip the cineplex on date night.