The burning question: Will Claudia Schiffer, the world's most expensive model, marry Prince Albert of Monaco, the world's most elusive bachelor? Ever since the prince and the show girl were photographed together at the main events of the Monegasque social season, the Grand Prix Formula One race in May and the Red Cross Ball in August, fashion houses, jet-set salons, and tabloid pressrooms from Munich to Manhattan have been rife with speculation: Can the girl who doesn't like to take her top off in front of the other models backstage at fashion shows find true happiness with a boy who has a knack for getting himself photographed beside topless bimbos on speeding pleasure boats? Is the radiantly beautiful and surprisingly wholesome lawyer's daughter from Rheinberg, Germany, who made more than $6 million last year posing as a sex kitten for clients such as Guess?, Revlon, and Chanel, but doesn't drink, smoke, or stay out after midnight, the long-awaited answer to Prince Rainier's prayers? Will "the new Brigitte Bardot''—a comparison Schiffer is tired of—restore the scandal-ridden Grimaldis and the mini-nation they rule to a state of Grace ?

'One thing I can tell you is that I'm not getting married right now. I'm only 22."

"It started out as a media thing this summer,'' says well-connected French aristocrat and journalist Emmanuel de Brantes, "but now it seems it could really happen. Even the royalist weekly Point de Vue did a story on them, and they are usually very cautious.'' The principals, of course, aren't saying much. "I prefer not to talk about that,'' says Claudia Schiffer between sips of fresh apricot juice in the bar of the Ritz in Paris. "But one thing I can tell you is that I'm not getting married right now. I'm only 22. I do know Albert very well. I live in Monte Carlo, so it's only normal.''

A friend who dined with Schiffer and the prince and a group of his jeunesse doree pals in a Monaco restaurant this fall says, "Albert just laughed out loud when someone asked if they were getting married. He seems so nervous.'' At 34, Prince Albert is definitely under pressure to take a bride. Even though the Vatican finally granted Princess Caroline an annulment from her first husband, French boulevardier Philippe Junot, in June, it has not yet recognized her marriage to the late Stefano Casiraghi, the son of an Italian industrialist. If Prince Rainier III, who is 69 and not in the best of health, should pass away before the Casiraghi children are officially legitimized by the church, the world's oldest reigning dynasty could find itself without an heir apparent. According to a 1918 treaty, Monaco would be at risk of becoming a French protectorate. And its rich residents might be only a princely heartbeat away from having to pay—heaven forbid—French taxes.

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Although Prince Rainier reportedly looks with favor upon a Grimaldi-Schiffer union, the palace hasn't officially commented on the putative romance, and Prince Albert has declined to discuss the subject. And so the rumors accumulate. In September, Jeannie Williams reported in USA Today that Prince Albert was said to have proposed to Claudia Schiffer, but that she had turned him down. This was lent some credence when she exchanged phone numbers at a big Valentino bash in New York with Tim Jefferies, a suave London art dealer formerly wed to Koo Stark. Meanwhile, William Norwich's column in the New York Post linked Prince Albert to Italian model Carla Bruni, who had been left temporarily stranded when Mick Jagger made up with Jerry Hall. But then Bruni started dating French movie star Vincent Perez, and Schiffer resurfaced at an Olympic Tower party with Prince Albert, who was nevertheless seen later that same evening at an East Side night spot, "engaged in overt necking,'' as the Post's "Page Six'' phrased it, with a blonde bistro manager named Sonje Tremont. At the end of the month, the German daily Bild announced that Claudia Schiffer had broken up with her steady boyfriend of four years. Bill Goins, an American model turned screenwriter, "to be free for Prince Albert.'' In November, to complicate things further, a young California woman named Tamara Rotola accused Prince Albert of fathering her baby daughter.

One close friend of Prince Albert's told me that, while "there have been official dates with Claudia, the model he's really crazy about is Kristen." A Buffalo-bom, Paris-based rising star known for her androgynous look and brash humor, Kristen McMenamy is the polar opposite of Claudia Schiffer. Other friends, however, maintain that Prince Albert is genuinely taken by Schiffer, and fashion insiders say that he sometimes sends flowers to her magazine shoots. And then there are those who swear that it was Karl Lagerfeld, a Monaco resident and intimate of the Grimaldi family, who hatched the plot to make his favorite model and countrywoman the next Princess Grace.

"I have nothing to do with that," declares the Kaiser of Fashion, presiding over the final fittings for Chanel's pret-aporter collection in Paris in October. He is enthroned behind a semicircular black desk, surrounded by worshipful fashion journalists, and devouring Godiva chocolates almost as fast as he talks. "This kind of girl doesn't need me for that. She is a resident of Monte Carlo, so it's only normal that she would meet him. There were photographs of them together. I didn't take them. But having said that, I think there would be no one better for that role. She's one of the sweetest girls I know, especially in this business, eh? Very well educated. And very balanced. She is now Germany's most famous woman in the world. She is the German girl. She's not a boring hausfrau, but there is something very clean about her, inside and outside. Something innocent even. But innocent without being stupid."

Just then, the object of his compliments emerges from a dressing room in the Chanel look for spring: a long white linen shirtdress, unbuttoned down the front to reveal white Calvin Klein-style briefs with a couple of Chanel gold chains wrapped around the elastic waistband. "The most beautiful woman in the world," Lagerfeld proclaims. "In men's underwear." Claudia Schiffer stands there demurely, slightly embarrassed, slightly pleased, as Lagerfeld orders an assistant to put a hat on her head, and his righthand man, Gilles Dufour, stage-whispers, "She's like a goddess on earth."

'She is now Germany's most famous woman. She is the German girl," says Lagerfeld.

The following day, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, attending a Paris Chanel show for the first time, takes a more detached view of the goddess who gets up to $50,000 a show: "It's odd to say this about her, but she's common. That's why she succeeds. She's the highest and the purest form of the common."

It is almost impossible to take an unattractive photograph of Claudia Schiffer— as Franca Sozzani, the editor in chief of Italian Vogue, says, "On a magazine page, she is sunshine itself"—but on the runway her undeniable charm comes out of a startling awkwardness, and her girlish sex appeal can verge on kitsch. Sometimes she seems like a porcelain milkmaid ordered up by Jeff Koons from the Hummel figurine factory. She's the height of cute in the Chloe show, galumphing down the runway to a Beatles tune in a cottoncandy-pink hippie dress, golden braids swinging out from under a ruffled pink bonnet. At Valentino, she looks like Barbie in a turquoise chiffon Gypsy outfit and moves as stiffly as a doll on platform sandals, but triumphs nonetheless with her good-natured oh-gosh expression. At Chanel, even comedian Sandra Bernhard, making a cameo appearance, walks better. In every show, Schiffer performs a remarkable routine each time she reaches the end of the runway: she makes goo-goo eyes at the important editors in the front row and the stacks of photographers behind them, then gives her upper lip a quick lick with her tongue and, as she turns back up the runway, raises an eyebrow and flashes a big come-hither smile. It's Goldilocks as sex symbol, and it makes the most jaded audience in the world laugh and melt at the same time.

But there is pride in her fetching smile, too, as there is in her cool comeback to the frequently voiced comment that she still doesn't glide the way a model should almost three years after she made her runway debut in the January 1990 Chanel haute couture show (and tripped). "Maybe that's why I have so much success," she says. "Because I don't know of any other reason."

Even in the epoch of supermodels, Claudia Schiffer's rise has been phenomenal: discovered in a Diisseldorf disco by a Paris modeling agent in 1988, when she was only 17 and still in high school, she rapidly ascended from the cover of French Elle to a 1989 Guess? campaign, photographed by Ellen von Unwerth, that spread her image worldwide. That same year, Karl Lagerfeld decided she would be the perfect replacement for Chanel's longtime official model, Ines de la Fressange, whom he had just dropped in a snit because she had agreed to portray Marianne, the French national symbol that decorates stamps and town halls. Schiffer has since been on more than 100 magazine covers, and last February she signed a three-year, $10 million contract with Revlon, the biggest deal in the history of modeling.

Yet, again and again, I was told by people who have worked with her from the beginning that Schiffer's success has not gone to her head, that she is "still sweet," "never late," "respectful to hairdressers," "even nice to ugly girls," and "totally professional." Says American Vogue fashion director Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, "She doesn't make scenes, she doesn't make problems, like some of the other girls. She doesn't have the ego of a star. And she is a superstar. When I work with her in the street in New York, people go mad. Old, young, men, women, black, white—they all know her, and they shout, 'Claudia! It's Claudia Schiffer! Claudia!' It's absolutely insane."

"She is not confused," adds Interview editor in chief Ingrid Sischy. "You don't look at Claudia Schiffer and think, Oh, my God, that girl is screwed up. You don't worry about what she'll do in 10 years' time."

Schiffer passed on a script Sam Shepard reportedly wrote for her.

Waiting her turn at the Chanel fitting, Schiffer seems quite secure as the dressers hover around this year's new face, 18year-old Kate Moss, whose flat-chested, waiflike looks are said to herald the beginning of the end for the full-figured power women who have dominated the last decade. Is she worried that her posing days are numbered? "No, I don't think like that," she replies in a voice that is soft but crisp. "I've reached everything already. Modeling is only for when you are young. There's never going to be anybody exactly like me. That's why I don't mind if there's another style coming up, or another star. That's the way it is in fashion. And I'll be doing other things. But I'll always be me."

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She takes acting classes at night in both New York and Paris, but her agent, Aline Marceline Souliers, who is also her only close friend in the modeling business, says, ''She doesn't want to be an actress at all costs. She wants to see if she's good." In fact, Schiffer passed on a script Sam Shepard reportedly wrote for her.

Claudia Schiffer has her detractors, of course, who say that she's money-minded, tough, boring, and standoffish. ''One thing is true," she says. "I choose my friends very carefully." Last spring, she was criticized when she sued the struggling avant-garde magazine R.O.M.E. for $30 million for running unauthorized photographs, including one bare-breasted shot, of her undressing backstage at a fashion show. Since then, the negatives have been given to her, and the litigation is now near settlement.

''It's something I decided from the very beginning," she explains. ''That I would never do nudity. I wanted to become a success without showing, you know, private things. I'm not saying that other girls who've done topless things or nude things are wrong to do that. It's just not my thing. ' ' (Even in her two best-selling calendars, she keeps her nipples and her bottom covered, if sometimes only with an elbow or a knee.)

''My family is the most important thing to me," she says. She calls her mother, Gudrun, in Rheinberg every day, and when the Berlin Wall came down, they stayed on the phone ''for hours. I was very, very emotional. I consider myself a European, but I'll never forget that I'm German." When she and her mother went to stay with Karl Lagerfeld in Monte Carlo two years ago, they insisted on sharing a room so that they could talk all night, and in the morning Claudia got up and made their bed. She entrusts a large part of her enormous earnings to her father, Heinz Schiffer, a successful lawyer, who invests it for her. ''She doesn't lift a finger without calling her father first," says Natasha Fraser, Paris correspondent for WWD. She's also very close to her younger sister and two younger brothers, and refuses to take jobs in August, so that she can spend the month with her family at their vacation house on Majorca.

She loves Impressionist painting, biographies of artists, the opera, movies. and tennis, and she admires Audrey Hepburn, Placido Domingo, and Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol? ''Even though I'm not O.K. with everything he did, I admire his courage to go against anything that's there."

Does she care about what people think of her ? "T care about what the people that I like think about me, but otherwise not. If I did, I'd be destroyed by now. Because with everything that's going on, and people talking and gossiping, you've got to be strong."

''She plays the game," says Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele. ''She's nice to everyone. But I think she'll be very happy when she can say good-bye to this jungle."

On Karl Lagerfeld's birthday in September 1991, Claudia Schiffer baked him a German marzipan cake. But the night after the Chanel show this October, when the Kaiser swept into a Left Bank gallery for the champagne opening of an exhibition of his photographs, including numerous portraits of her done up as a rococo hussy, his favorite model wasn't there. Claudia Schiffer was at the ballet, with her mother, her father, her brother Stefan, and her agent. Sounds like a princess in preparation to me.