Of all the leaders arriving at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh today -- the third such meeting of finance and other government ministers to discuss the crisis and recovery since the crash of Lehman Brothers a year ago -- French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been among the most headline-stealing. He has called for strict compensation limits for the banking executives who precipitated the crisis and has said he will ask for sanctions on countries that do not comply. The famously energetic French leader has even threatened to walk out of the summit if his demands aren't met.

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Early word out of Pittsburgh indicates that his brash style isn't necessarily going to get him what he wants -- but luckily, he's got a secret weapon. One of his cabinet officials has been making the press rounds with him, playing good cop to his bad cop in copious interviews in print and on television. That is Christine Lagarde, France's enigmatic finance minister and the former chair of the international law firm Baker & McKenzie. She has emerged in the past year as a major political player regarding the recession, and as a foil for Sarkozy. When he shouts, she coos. When he rages, she deploys wit. And when he bellows, she demurs.

That coolly philosophic attitude -- underpinned by a deep knowledge of labor law, corporations, and international management -- has made Lagarde one of Europe's most valuable economic negotiators. If Sarkozy doesn't get what he wants in the final communiqué, Lagarde, his more sensible half, just might.

Christine Lagarde was born to academic parents in Paris on New Year's Day in 1956. Her father, who died when she was a teenager, was a professor of English, literature, and ancient Greek, and her mother was a grammar-school teacher. To this day, Lagarde frequently quotes philosophy, and she nearly entered legal academia herself. She excelled in her youth at school and athletics, growing to 6 feet tall and winning a bronze medal in the French national synchronized swimming competition at age 15.

After finishing high school, she spent a formative year on an American Field Service exchange program at the swank Holton-Arms girls' school in Bethesda, Md., just outside Washington. It was 1974, at the height of the Watergate crisis. Lagarde interned on Capitol Hill as an office assistant for William Cohen, a Republican congressman from Maine who later served as defense secretary in Bill Clinton's cabinet. She grew close with her American host family, and enamored of the country, which she says is more "positive" than France. She also garnered a skill which would prove useful later in life: perfect command of English.

But she returned home to study political science at Institut d'Etudes Politiques, d'Aix. Initially, she considered becoming part of the civil service, but was rejected (one of the few failures Lagarde admits) from the highly selective program and decided to become a lawyer instead, focusing on employment law.

Despite her high marks at graduation, she was roundly rejected at French law firms, so sexist was the legal culture in Paris. Then, she interviewed at Baker & McKenzie, a large Chicago-based firm with a clientele of major international corporations like Coca-Cola. The Paris office had a female partner, Monique Nion, who became Lagarde's mentor. "There was a feeling of 'I went through hell, my dear, and by God, so will you,'" she told Investor's Business Daily. (Her office did not respond to a request for an interview.)

From the Paris office, Lagarde quickly ascended through the firm's ranks by managing major antitrust and labor cases, including ones with mass redundancies. She made partner in 1987 and then became the head of the firm in Western Europe, shuttling between Brussels, Milan, Madrid, London, and other cities. The firm still had an old-boy culture, which Lagarde undercut by outworking her colleagues and maintaining a cutting wit, one colleague recalls. "She was a very smart, very talented even-hand."

In 1999, she became the company's first ever female chairman (she dislikes the terms "chairwoman" and "chairperson"), moving to Chicago with the mission of streamlining and centralizing the diffuse practice. Derided as "McFirm" by its competitors, Baker & McKenzie had become massive and inefficient, earning far less per partner than firms like Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. In her five years at the helm, she increased revenue by half, to more than $1 billion annually, and integrated the company's 68 offices. She also radically transformed partner compensation, despite serious opposition (pay cuts were "like taking your lunch," the colleague says), making the system more results-based and fairer.

Early one morning in 2004, Lagarde received a call from Paris. Then-Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was on the phone, asking her to come back to France and join the government. She left her $1 million job to become a junior trade minister in President Jacques Chirac's cabinet and has spent the past five years ascending the ranks into France's political elite. In the trade bureau and as agriculture minister, a post she held briefly in 2007, she earned a reputation as a good soldier for Chirac, who advocated for economic dirigisme, or state controls. She won particular plaudits for her advocacy of certain trade protections for farmers -- antithetical to her current positions though that may have been.

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