I know I am not the only reader who hastily looked up airline schedules as they read about the passenger who flew back and forth across the Atlantic last week accompanied by his almost-untreatable tuberculosis. The story won those internet hit parade contests: the coveted “most-read” lists favoured by news websites.

He was a U.S. criminal injuries lawyer — obviously a really bad one — who flew Atlanta-Paris-Athens-Rome-Prague for his wedding and honeymoon, and then back to the U.S. via Montreal to avoid the authorities. I assume the bride will file for divorce tomorrow, encouraged by her father, a TB expert.

Once I found out that I was not on the same plane as this hopeless, hapless man, I became blasé. As is the way, I shared airspace to and from Paris with a number of hearty sneezers, coughers and wildly inaccurate nose-blowers. I remember giving them a good glare, as we polite Canadians do when we’re angry. “That one sounds positively tubercular,” I whispered to my husband. Who knew?

There were other irritants. The disadvantage of those back-of-the-seat-mounted TV screens that are directed by tapping on the screen is that eight-year-old boys don’t grasp the concept that they are banging on my back as they surf, even when I hiss at them between the seats and threaten to hurt them when their parents aren’t looking.

But I don’t complain to the flight attendant because I follow the Lebowitz Rule of Going Out. Invented by the American essayist Fran Lebowitz, it was inspired by people who protested at her smoking, and runs as follows: “I stay at home as much as possible, and so should these people. When it is necessary, however, to go out of the house, they must be prepared, as am I, to deal with the unpleasant personal habits of others. That is what ‘public’ means.”

Sharing air, impatience and crimes against cuisine

I bow to that. Public is public. Airplanes are public places even if they do have the great boon of armrests, the equivalent of fences between houses in my peculiar neighbourhood. (Fences run rampant there; there’s no rage like simmering white middle-class lady rage, let me tell you.) Passengers share air, impatience, fear of blood clots headed thigh-wards to the heart, mystification — what is salmon ravioli but a crime against cuisine? — and horror and tears.

On my flight, the horror came from the half of the plane that was watching the new biopic, La Môme, on the life of magnificent, bug-eyed heroin-user Edith Piaf, and tears from those watching Emilio Estevez’s film, Bobby, on the assassination of Robert Kennedy. When the soundtrack offered Kennedy’s speech on war — “Too often we honour swagger and bluster and wielders of force,” — George W. Bush with his “Mission Accomplished” banner came to mind.

But since everyone was watching the movies at different times, passengers were simultaneously giggling, or struck into silence or quietly weeping into their champagne aperitifs. It must have been an odd sight for the flight attendants, like a giant therapy group placed in rows while having a collective emotional breakthrough.

“Public” on the Paris Métro means good behaviour. This astounds me. People don’t crowd the doors. In order to make room for other passengers, they even stand when they could pull down a seat and sit. In Canada’s House of Commons, they’d be banging those seats up and down in petulant rage, but here, the seats are used as an instrument of courtesy. I also note the difference in public dress. The writer Edmund White says half of Parisians are “content to appear neat and anonymous,” which is true, but I note that they all look like individuals nevertheless. They have their own style. In Canada, people are uniform in their messy anonymity. I don’t quite know how the French do this, but they are distinctively themselves, when they go out. Canadians like to meld in, their banner being the un-ironed T-shirt.

I am rarely offended by what I read — the statement “I find that offensive” is ludicrous, as one should take note of rational thoughts, not automatically bow before inchoate feelings — but the Toronto Star recently ran a letter saying “Ironing T-shirts? Who does that?”

I was bitterly insulted. I iron T-shirts, ma’am. It’s my idea of what we should aim for after we roll out of bed, a sort of discipline that the French have drilled into them. As Lebowitz would say, that’s what “public” means. But I’m quite alone in this opinion, so I’ll drop it.

Worrying about the French

I worry about the French almost as much as they worry about their national essence (their état) and their history (their gloire) and the purity of their language (the Frenchity of Frenchness). This is a nation that has its constitution spelled out in letters on the tiles of the Concorde Métro station. You could spend days in there reading the thing.

And yet they vote in Nicolas Sarkozy, the dodgiest politician the EU has seen since Tony Blair. Are they mad? I expressed my tragic, blasted love for Ségolène Royal to a man sitting next to me as we, along with two Australian friends, ate raw meat in Brasserie Bofinger. The man attracted my attention because he and his wife had sat in hateful silence for an hour, a marriage of long standing, clearly.

He turned his red, bloated gourmand face to me. “She was too stupid,” he said heavily, a remark clearly aimed as much at his wife as at Royal. And then he turned to my husband for masculine confirmation.

“George Bush? John Howard in Australia?” my husband responded. “So you mean that stupidity is a disqualification for a woman, but not for a man?”

We all broke into easy laughter, the man’s psychosis re-routed into brief humanity by a quick joke. But my heart was full of pride. My friends were Aussies, relaxed people, ready to see the humour in things. And I had fallen for my husband precisely for comebacks like that. And if you’re a misogynist and don’t enjoy seeing your kind mocked into sanity for a moment, hey, that’s what “public” means.

This Week

I read a blizzard of foreign newspapers and watched no television whatsoever. Except for The Sopranos, but you and I will be discussing that.

And this was the highlight of my week. The Guardian International Edition reported that the remains of a German doctor had been found 22 years after the man had suddenly disappeared. They were next to his suicide note. Siegfried B. had told his wife he was going out. He took with him a blanket, a pillow and a bottle of schnapps. His wife never gave up hope that he would return, but there were rumours that the doctor had been kidnapped by the Stasi because of his political activism.

Last week his wife decided to have the asbestos roof panels in their garage replaced. She had been parking beneath his mummified corpse for decades.

There’s a lesson there for all of us, although I couldn’t possibly say what it is.