I can’t say I knew her well. We had several long conversations over dinner at the home of Kenneth and Carol Adelman, longtime friends of hers. (Ken had worked as her deputy while she was U.N. ambassador.) She had a good sense of humor, liked France and small dogs.

The only good anecdote I have to offer involves her small dog and mine. She complained that she had gotten a ticket in Bethesda, Maryland for leaving her dog in her car on a warm day while she shopped. (The windows were partly down.) Some snitch had snitched. She loved her dog and thought it ludicrous that anyone thought she would allow it come to grief. And she only left it in the car because snooty merchants would let it’s four paws clatter across their immaculate floors! What was she to do, leave it at home, alone? Why don’t these people mind their own business?

I couldn’t agree more. I told her to use my line with the next busybody: “What do you care if I left one piece of my property locked inside another piece of my property?”

She laughed. Then she said she intended to steal that line. Then, she said, that dogs don’t really seem like property.

She also had a hilarious story about the French post office rejecting a package of hers because it was wrapped in the wrong color paper and bound with the wrong twine. If I could remember it all, I would tell it here. But I can’t.

The memorial service was beautiful and moving, marred only by some politically correct tics that the Episcopal Church can’t resist these days. Bible passages that used the word “men” were replaced by “people” and so on. While this safeguards the sensibilities of grammar-challenged feminists, it just clangs in the ears of the rest of us. At least, we were spared “God, Our Parent” and got the familiar “God Our Father” instead.

Some 600 people (plus Vice President Cheney’s Secret Service) were there, representing most of the stripes of right-wing Washington. Some wore the discreet emblems of the movement for the day, an Adam Smith necktie or cuff links.

George Will gave a humorous remembrance of her time at the United Nations. John Bolton quoted country singer Merle Haggard to the effect that whenever your run down my country “you are walking on the fighting side of me,” adding that was Jeane’s approach at the U.N. And, by implication, his.

These memorials are important to all families, especially political ones. If you don’t praise fallen heroes, you get no new ones.

Still the human behind the hero gets lost sometimes.

One sunny afternoon a few years ago, I was sitting with Jeane behind the Adelman’s house. Somehow we were talking about the nature of marriage. I observed that making a bad pairing could derail a life, perhaps for life.

She agreed. But a good one, she said, makes life possible. She had had a good one, a very good one. Her husband had died the year before and she still missed him.

I asked her if she thought there was something unusual about conservative leaders, who seemed to have an unusual number of happy marriages. Ron and Nancy, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, Milton and Rose Friedman, who later wrote a book about their lives called “Two Lucky People.”

No, she said. Politics destroys marriages. I was just naming the survivors.

Blunt and right on target, to the end.