''Can I escape all this Jubilee nonsense and visit you in France?'' Almost up to the end of last week, I half-expected the call, text message or e-mail.
In the event, it never came. But then it is just as well.
There was no respite from all that fawning celebration even here. The loftily republican land of liberté, égalité et fraternité may have hit upon its own way of dealing with royalty at the back end of the 18th century. But on occasions like the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, it is not about to be upstaged by la presse anglo-saxone.
All over the weekend, and on some of the days before, France or at any rate its media seemed out to prove it could be as royal as the royalists.
Fair play, Var-Matin showed some sense of priority. It devoted the first 11 pages of one edition to the same subject, but that subject was not the long reign of another country's sovereign but the Toulon rugby club's adventures in Toulouse, last night's semi-final of the French Top 14 competition.
British royalty was relegated to a brief item on the foreign page and to be on the safe side, the ''question of the day'' on page 67 returned to the talk of the hour: would Toulon beat Clermont, to which 73 per cent loyally responded Oui. And they did, 15-12, thanks to the last of Jonny Wilkinson's five penalties.
Otherwise the Jubilee and associations with the Royaume-Uni were hard to avoid, even if you innocently booked a table to take your wife, as French as they come but missing England, to lunch by the sea.
In one edition of Le Figaro was to be found a full page - ''How Elizabeth II became cool again'' - in the main section while most of another page was taken by a preview of television coverage. And there was more, from Le Figaro's own highly respectful specialist on European monarchies, Stéphane Bern, in the magazine supplement.
Bern has met the Queen a couple of times. On one occasion, during a state visit to France in 1992, he committed what he now describes as a gaffe during their exchange of banalities about his work.
"You work for Le Figaro?" HM began. ''More precisely for the Saturday supplements,'' he replied, prompting a polite show of fascination with this detail: ''Oh really, how interesting. So there are supplements at the weekend?''
Our royal chronicler explained that it was not unlike a Saturday equivalent of the Sunday Times before remembering this was the paper that had just serialised extracts from Andrew Morton's book on Diana, Princess of Wales. A little pout suggested to him that the Queen did not appreciate the comparison though she was gracious enough to go on to say his work must be exciting.
Var-Matin has a Saturday magazine too, Femina, and compensated for its obsession with Toulon and rugby by stuffing it full of all things British.
Catherine Zeta-Jones explained the distinction between Welshness and Britishness (''much the same except that we don't consider ourselves English''), there was more than enough fashion, music and food and we were introduced to a strange racket sport, padel (''made in GB, developing in France''). A double-page spread carried a selection of spot interviews with French people of all ages, visitors to London and residents, at the St Pancras Eurostar terminus. One man liked Tesco - and it is far cheaper than Intermarché, though he singled out round-the-clock opening among its virtues - while a girl of 12 enjoyed going to school in the UK, finding it involved less drudgery. A Eurostar worker raved about Banksy and a young man found London's streets, if not paved with gold, cleaner than the Parisian trottoir
Femina itself - herself? - applauded Britain so much that it is hard to know where to start: PAYE, our phlegmatic, courteous and punctual ways (if sometimes hyper-rigid with the time-keeping bit), black cabs, greetings cards, bridesmaids and wedding cakes, public services staff, sandwiches and, along with the royal family, Emma Watson, Adele and Colin Firth.
All this shameless courting of nos meilleurs ennemis extended beyond the print media, of course.
My French sister-in-law, all alone on (French) Mothering Sunday because the family was otherwise enagaged, contented herself with bank-to-bank television commentary from the Thames flotilla and there seemed no end to the royal documentaries on this or that channel.
It all presented a somewhat sanitised vision of the Britain over which the Queen has nominally ruled for 60 years. But it also showed how well the British still do pomp and ceremony.
In the end, I turned to comforts from home - the UK press - for a more robust appraisal. I was hardly disappointed: the Mail deplored, on successive pages, the dress sense of the Duchess of Cambridge - ''oh Kate, did you really have to steal the show in scarlet?"" - and the BBC's ''historically awful'' post-Dimbleby coverage. ''An onslaught of inanity, idiocy and full cream sycophancy,'' wrote Jan Moir.
True, a French reporter on the spot did allow in passing that the duchess's outift was ''less discreet'' than the Queen's. Leaving aside that, and some obligatory barbs about the weather, I am not sure the French were any less reverential.
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