When husbands go on business trips, women revert within minutes to their pre-lapsarian selves. For four days, I lived as I wished to live. Subsisting entirely on rice pudding, I watched TV like a soccer fan, cheering on the agonies of French commentators left slack-jawed by the French “Non” — make that “NON!” — on the European Union constitution.

Toasting gorgeous French defiance with Veuve Clicquot, I also stuffed myself with harmless pop culture, normally forbidden to me as said husband calls it “rubbish.” What with singing along to John Denver CDs at 4 a.m. (Why? Because I can) and trying desperately to watch all 24 hours of the first series of the American action show 24 before someone with intellectual standards came home, I was getting three hours sleep a night, tops.

He’s back. I must stop pondering why Kiefer Sutherland has a fingerprint scanner in his car for the severed hands of people he has just shot to death (is this standard in American cars now?) and raise my game.

Let me explain why the wise yet cranky French voter, and now the emphatic Dutch, has just taught us a sturdy lesson.

The detestable French President Jacques Chirac made a howler on May 31. It was Pentecost, a public holiday, and he cancelled it, saying the taxation on the extra day’s work would pay for better care for the elderly. Last year, 15,000 mainly elderly people died during a heat wave.

Anyone could have told him that you don’t tie a public punishment to a public good. It’s like holding a gun to the head of those little poodles Parisian matrons love and saying, “Off to the factory, or the dog gets it.” (This sums up every plot twist in 24, by the way, if you’re interested. No, you say?)

Canadians would grumble and go to work. Instead, France gave Mr. Chirac the collective finger and stayed home.

I adored them for this. They spent the day imagining the France Mr. Chirac wanted them to vote for in the EU constitution. Gone would be the five-week vacation, the parade of public holidays throughout the year, the ability to linger over lunch cooked with ingredients from the French terroir, or have a nooner.

They looked across the Channel and saw filthy British hospital emergency rooms coming their way, genetically modified grains that would make Poilâne loaves taste like Texas Toast, and a wave of white plastic everything, cutlery and café chairs containing poisonous phthalates that would feminize French male babies.

They saw Americanization. They saw Anglo-Saxonage. And they also saw Turkey, the latest nation to seek admission to the hurriedly expanded EU. It wasn’t racism, but fear for their jobs that made them object to this. A newspaper cartoon showed Mr. Chirac asking his Prime Minister who would be at work on Pentecost. “So far, four Polish plumbers and three Romanian plasterers.”

France is actually short of plumbers. They need 6,000. The point is that France has high unemployment and they want 6,000 French plumbers, the kind of protectionism impossible under the hated constitution but what keeps French wages high and a good life possible.

Mr. Chirac has made Dominique de Villepin his new Prime Minister, and while I admire the man’s magnificent swoop of sexy hair — is it mousse or just a blow dryer on cold? — the fact is, he has never held an elected post and exemplifies the elitism that will flourish as enraged French workers are turned into wage slaves.

This is Mr. de Villepin’s idea of a rousing political speech: “Let us stop drinking from the enchanted waters of Lethe, which strike with amnesia those who want to quench their thirst, and let us dare to taste those ‘fresh waters that run from the Lake of Memory’ — as the words say on the golden bars of the disciples of Orpheus, that bard of metamorphosis and of ascending reincarnation.”

I can’t see it going over well on the farm of an artisanal-cheese maker just visited by Kraft Foods.

Left-wing French people were forced, by the tangles of their last election that propped up the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, to vote for Mr. Chirac, something many did, literally, with clothespins on their noses.

The Non voters were wise enough to see that it didn’t actually matter if the constitution failed. Most Europeans don’t want to live in one European nation bossed by strangers. They are happy to live in a powerful union of nations, one that can rival the United States, China and India, but they don’t want to be pushed around more than necessary. As Non voters said in on-the-street interviews, “I like my country. I don’t want to give away more of it.”

BBC commentator John Simpson explained it thus: The French always wanted a tiny, perfect EU, a “deepening” — France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries — because they could control it. Britain wanted a “broadening,” an expansion that would create a superpower impossible for Germany or France to dominate. Mr. Simpson says broadening has beaten deepening. An EEC of six nations has become an EU of 25 nations and almost half a billion people.

Enough, the French said. They drew a line in the soil, not a Maginot Line, but one that actually works against constitution-approved Germans with a lust for political Lebensraum. And Europe shall walk slowly along, encumbered, annoyed but still making progress, with the Treaty of Nice, which is a perfectly nice little treaty that doesn’t get up anyone’s nose, excessively.

The French lesson: Just say Non merci. Paul Martin, the next time you meet the Americans, keep it in mind. We are Canadians, who no longer need drink from the enchanted waters of Lethe . . .

Oh, do shut up, M. de Villepin.