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By Paul Taylor PARIS (Reuters) - On a rainy day in November 2011 in the hulking concrete Palace of Festivals in Cannes, where film stars strut on the red-carpeted staircase in warmer months, Angela Merkel ambushed Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. With financial markets in turmoil and speculation rife that the European single currency area could break up, the German chancellor tried to bounce the then Spanish prime minister without notice into taking an International Monetary Fund bailout, according to his account of the meeting. "She greeted me pleasantly and almost without any introduction put forward a proposal about which we had not had any indication," Zapatero writes in a book to be published on Tuesday in Spain. "Merkel asked me if I was willing to ask for a preventive credit line of 50 billion euros from the IMF, while another 85 billion euros would go to Italy," he said.
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