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Let's be blunt: At the end of the day, the only real estate Julie Couillard has been selling is herself.

This is not to say she isn't adorable, great-looking and, to judge by her appearance on the TVA network this week, articulate and polished in both official languages.

But as Prince Herbert once told the King of Swamp Castle in the profoundly silly 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "But I don't like her!" whereupon the King replied, "Don't like her? What's wrong with her?! She's beautiful, she's rich, she's got huge [gestures to chest] tracts of land!"

It's not, actually, that I don't like Ms. Couillard. It's that I am weary of women like her, women who are celebrated for their tracts of land and, it appears, little else. I am weary of such dames getting a pass. And speaking as one who has never been seen as decoration on a man's arm and thus perhaps for a legion of the shy-tracted or tract-deficient, I have to tell you, I've had it up to here with notes such as the one I got yesterday from a male friend.

He wrote, in part, to urge me to wade into the "Julie C. debate. She came off really well on TV last night," he said. "Well-spoken, somber/sober, let alone good-looking too."

Ms. Couillard has moved from Gilles Giguère, a loan shark and biker associate who, upon his arrest in 1996 (he was found with an inconvenient stash of machine guns and weed) agreed to testify against the Hells Angels and then was murdered while awaiting trial, to Stéphane Sirois, a member of the Rockers bike club-turned-star witness whom she divorced in 1999, to Robert Pepin, a fellow convicted of possessing stolen goods in connection with truck hijackings and who later committed suicide, to Maxime Bernier, Canada's hapless foreign affairs minister whose association with Ms. Couillard led merely to the death of his political career.

This is a list of the men whom Ms. Couillard has been respectively living with, married to, living with and involved with since 1993. There is nothing wrong with any of it, though it is perhaps noteworthy that the lady is, if not a widow-maker, certainly unlucky for those who fall for her. It is not a huge list for a woman of 38, but it appears just long enough that it seems to have precluded her from ever working on a career, or even getting a proper job.

In that much-touted TVA interview this week, for instance, Ms. Couillard was asked by the very solicitous Paul Larocque, "You were working as a real estate agent?"

"Yes," she replied.

"Are you still working?" he asked.

"Well, I still have my licence," she said, adding that the media hullabaloo over her relationship with Mr. Bernier has affected her career and that businessmen aren't even returning her calls, part of the devastating effects of the vague but wide-ranging plot against her that, by her account, has seen listening devices planted in her box spring (and then covertly removed), had her fearing for her life ("Of course I did, sir," she told Mr. Larocque) and stripped her of her dignity.

Well, yesterday, the real estate broker where she purportedly toiled, Kevlar Real Estate Investments, issued a news release clarifying that Ms. Couillard has not ever and is not now working for the company.

She is an independent agent, apparently, and would have used Kevlar in case, you know, she ever sold a property. But as Kevlar president René Bellerive said in the news release, that never happened. I am reliably informed that sometimes, such "inactive" agents are kept on a broker's roster as a favour, or for a modest fee, so that they don't have to go through the tedious requalifying procedure.

Well then, so much for the real estate career cruelly halted in its tracks. It leaves us with the other descriptions repeated in the press, "model and aspiring actress." The former is the female equivalent of a guy putting "hockey player" on his résumé; if he isn't playing in the NHL, or at least with an affiliate of same, it is but recreation. As for the latter, what you might want to become, especially when approaching middle age, doesn't count.

According to the Toronto Star, Ms. Couillard approached that newspaper on May 15, offering an exclusive interview for $50,000. The paper's spokesman said, "She's the one who approached us." A spokesman for TVA insists that "no payment of any kind" was made for the network's interview. Fair enough, but it seems a reasonable inference that it was not for lack of trying on Ms. Couillard's part.

She claimed, at the start of the interview, to be speaking out because "I need to re-establish my credibility and my dignity." That presumes the two existed before this whole business erupted. "I was humiliated as a woman," she said. "I haven't done anything wrong, and I strongly do believe I am entitled to my dignity." Indeed; no better way to get your dignity back than by being paid for it.

Question: Your boyfriend leaves business papers behind at your place. Do you, A: Phone him up and say, "Doofus, you left some papers at my place. How do you want to get 'em?" Or B: Call up a top lawyer to tell you that they belong to him, not you, and to return them pronto? Ms. Couillard chose B. Said documents, she told TVA, she didn't read, yet they made her very uncomfortable, even panicked: Now, why would that be?

She even managed to blame Mr. Bernier for "that famous dress," the one with the plunging neckline she wore to his swearing-in ceremony last August.

"I didn't pick the dress," she told Mr. Larocque. "Maxime did." It was, she explained, her first official function, her coming-out as his girlfriend, and as she put it, "I'd never been exposed to the protocol."

So, it was mutual then.

She's a pretty girl, with romantic links to dubious characters, and she has those vast tracts. But can we please leave off with treating her as a wronged, tragic party? She made her bed, many times over, and at some point, whoever was the dog, Mr. Bernier or Ms. Couillard, they both got up with fleas.