The following is an EJP report: French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 23-year-old son Jean and his wife Jessica gave birth to a baby boy in the western Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.

The baby was named Solal, after the hero of a novel by Swiss writer Albert Cohen. The first name Solal comes from the Hebrew ‘Solel’ which means “to carve a path,” showing the way for others and leading by example.

It is the president’s first grandchild.

Jean Sarkozy is a law student and regional councilor west of Paris. He married former high-school classmate Jessica Sebaoun-Darty, an heiress of a Jewish family that founded the electronics retailer group Darty. The Darty family founded what became an eponymous nationwide chain of big-box home appliance stores, now owned by Britain’s KESA Electricals group.

The couple announced last year that they were expecting their first child.

The French president, who turns 55 next Thursday, has two sons from his first marriage – Jean and Pierre – and a third, 12-year-old Louis, from his second. Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly has Jewish roots — as his mother was born to the Mallah family, one of the oldest Jewish families of Salonika or Thessaloniki, in Greece.