ALATTYAN, Hungary

Someday there may be a Sarkozy Street in this village, or even a memorial to the family that once had a manor here. For now, however, the only trace of the ancestors of the French president-elect that anyone can point to is a rusty gate next to a decrepit cafe, which, according to a cluster of patrons around the dank bar, once led onto the estate.

There is some dispute over this. At least there was when Andor Takacs, a senior citizen wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “United States of America,” was asked to serve as a second source. “You heard that in there, did you?” he said, nodding toward the bar and laughing. The tie-breaker was supplied by a youth who bicycled up: “Must be their gate,” he said. “Why else would everybody be photographing it?”

Mr. Takacs admitted that he had heard of Mr. Sarkozy only in the past year. And what did he think now? “Well, I’m happy if Hungarian people succeed around the world,” he said, citing Franz Liszt and Tom Lantos as cases in point. “I hope he helps us as much as Tom Lantos has.” Mr. Lantos, born Lantos Tamas Peter to a family of Hungarian Jews in Budapest, survived the Holocaust and is a Democratic congressman from California.

The reactions of these and several other townspeople canvassed about the incredible news that the son of an erstwhile landowner had become famous suggested that whatever history may be lurking among the shuttered houses and somnolent streets of Alattyan, the Sarkozy clan was not a major part of it. Or at least not until national and international news media descended on the village.

A stack of reporters’ calling cards lay alongside Sandor Mosonyi, 69, a retired local police official, as he sat down for yet another interrogation under dozens of mounted hunting trophies at his home. Another town official, prominently quoted in several globally circulated reports, took umbrage at being accosted casually in the street. An interview required a proper appointment and a display of credentials, he declared.

The reason for the attention, of course, was the mandatory feature about the new French president’s noble Hungarian roots. Once upon a time the Sarkozys had an estate with a chateau on these flat farmlands about 60 miles east of Budapest; several had served in the regional administration.

The trouble is that these roots had been uprooted. Mr. Mosonyi said the manor house was burned to the ground by departing Romanian occupation forces (yes, Romanian) in 1919, and the Sarkozy estates were sold in the 1930s. Then came World War II, Soviet occupation, the People’s Republic of Hungary. By the time Hungary became a real democratic republic in 1989, Alattyan was a sleepy village of about 2,000 souls with little memory of its feudal past, and Nicolas Sarkozy was mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, a deputy in the French National Assembly and a rising star in French politics with little interest in his feudal roots.

His father, Paul Sarkozy, had left Hungary in 1948 and followed a typically complicated émigré’s odyssey that ended up in Paris. There he married a woman of Greek Jewish origins, whom he left with their three sons when Nicolas was a small boy. So Nicolas was raised with no direct contact with Hungarian language or culture. When a woman of North African heritage questioned him about his roots during the campaign, he retorted: “You are not Algerian, but French. And I am not Hungarian.”

That may be so, and Hungarians have no illusion that “one of theirs” will now be camped out in the Élysée Palace (though Mr. Mosonyi did say plans are afoot to invite the president of the French Republic to Alattyan’s 800th birthday bash in 2009).

But when Mr. Sarkozy campaigns to keep Turkey out of Europe, or calls frustrated North African youths scum, or tightens France’s borders against African immigrants, he should be reminded that he would not be where he is if France had not once let in a displaced nobleman from Hungary or a Sephardic Jew from Greece.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company