Out of the blue, appropriately enough, came a message from Sabine Herold, a young woman who achieved more than her 15 minutes of fame after leading a wave of protests against French public service strikes four years ago.
As well as being of the libertarian right, she is fiercely intelligent and highly attractive, and all three qualities, but above all her contempt for le vice français, endeared her to a certain kind of English conservative.
In France, she has found it hard to shake off the Mlle Thatcher tag.
But in the forthcoming parliamentary elections, she is - as I reported she would a year ago - standing in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, one of 50 candidates for the Alternative Liberale party. Putting forward so many would-be MPs, she says, was a "great challenge".
She followed up my report last June by coming round to talk to me at length about her political vision, essentially about freeing people from nanny state controls.
Sabine Herold may get nowhere, for now, but she could do worse than read what I have written in my two most recent postings about the café and the church at La Motte. That is exactly the kind of freedom issue that her party could usefully exploit.
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