It has finally happened, this thing against which great women and men fought so hard and with such distinction. I think they called it la Ré-Résistance. General Charles de Gaulle led it — after the war was over, oddly enough — with his special cap and huge aristocratic nose presiding over a snotty populace he claimed was ungovernable because it produced 325 varieties of cheese.

Cheese has nothing to do with it. The general failed in his mission. The French have become polite.

I know this because I just came back and I was revolting. If I may use the same cheese metaphor used by the French to explain their previous consistent impossibility, I caught a bleu d’Auvergne (a sharp, alert-making blue-spotted slice) of a cold on the flight to Paris and partly because I was hit with vicious insomnia. I lay awake each night all night in the hotel room in a puddled Epoisse (a runny stinky cheese) of sweat, whispering on the hour, “Can I watch BBC World with the sound off?” or “Can I drag the armchair into the toilet and read my Joan Barfoot novel?” The answer was always no, so I lay awake counting Les Vieux Corses (little square Corsican sheep cheeses) and waiting for the shops to open.

Without being insensitive to prisoners suffering from the sleep deprivation the U.S. Army says is “not” torture, I can tell you that after two nights, I would have confessed to anything. And then I would arise to meet the city.

Recently, I wrote a column about pharmacists, in which I suggested that self-declared “ethical” types who torment young women about their sexual encounters instead of handing out the newly non-prescription morning-after pill with friendly information and a smile should find a job that really torments women: selling them high-heeled shoes.

We have much to learn from the French pharmacien. “Madame, I am dying soon. My throat is in pain and I am full of swollen. One breathes not.” She came out from behind the counter and gave me medicaments, one that demolished my fever, removed the breathing obstacles that frankly reminded me of raw skate (a grey flat ooze of a fish) and a spray that numbed my throat (I use it on my forehead now whenever Bushlet appears on TV). She also sold me the only self-tanning lotion that doesn’t turn my skin into the bubbling white crust of a Brillat-Savarin cheese.

The French were kindness itself, and it was because I spoke French, albeit stupidly, but I was so fevered that nothing embarrassed me. Salespeople kissed me as I left. The French officer at Passport Control wished me good sex. The Canadian passport officer told my husband that he was a fortunate man (no, that’s never happened before). And it was all because I was too ill to be the tight-spined Canadian I used to be.

The English weren’t normal that election week either. The Conservative slogan was “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” I was thinking that with that slogan the Tories had sliced their own heads into brain steaks, but the London committee desperately seeking the 2012 Olympics said it was thinking that the bid was dead. The slogan, which translates as “Are you thinking that wogs stink, gypsies are filth and poor people should sell their organs, cuz we are?” was so shabbily racist that the IOC could not risk inviting black/brown athletes to a country that allowed that sort of thing.

This wasn’t the Britain I used to love. And this wasn’t the France I used to know.

Fortunately, the Americans remained the same puzzlement as ever, a bland fromage allégé, which I prefer to translate as alleged cheese. It tastes of nothing and is almost, horrors, processed.

I upped and went to Giverny, hoping to die and be used as compost in the nation’s finest garden. But the American tourists on the bus ignored the French guide pointing out the former royal forests filled with wild boar and deer. These were Kerry voters who loved Ah-nuld, a cognitive dissonance that could slice diamonds. They were oblivious. They talked endlessly about their own country and their own families with a savage competitiveness. If it didn’t happen in the US of A, it just didn’t happen.

I was madly hoping to see boars crashing tusks, but the real boars were on the minibus. The Americans talked about their children’s private schools, trumpeting dollar figures, and their children’s law schools and whose law firm was bigger and which child burned out fastest and whose second marriage was better, like a David Mamet play full of crosstalk, all done without taste or discernment, like alleged cheese. Meanwhile, the French countryside, every inch crafted and loved and bled over, sped past.

Later, loaded with medicaments, I have drinks with Jean-Max Méjean, a film critic I knew from Toronto’s Hot Docs documentary festival in April. He explains the difference between an intelligent person and an intellectual. Only the French would pare the cheese this thinly. Ah oui, I said, but since the concept eluded me, I am clearly neither.

He is more skeptical about his country. At the same moment that day as right-wing President Jacques Chirac strutted down the Champs Elysées with his trim chic army, Jean-Max saw left-wing leader Lionel Jospin defeated by fascist Jew-hater Jean-Marie Le Pen and forced to support Mr. Chirac for France’s honour, bicycling alone down the boulevard Raspail behind his wife.

There were a dozen cheeses in that paragraph alone.

Nations wax and wane, and my love of them does the same. I love France, but I may have been too addled for its complexities. It is fine to be home now, with the bluebells out. An honest cheddar country.