THE return of Lucien Bouchard to the House of Commons is one of those moments politicians cherish. It is, they say, a chance to put aside politics and show themselves as "real people." Charming as this is to imagine, it is of course untrue. Politicians aren't real people. Scenes in Parliament that attract the journalistic label of "high drama" are usually precisely that, well-staged rituals, the more so for the emotions so grave an episode as M. Bouchard's illness, near death, mutilation and resurrection might engender. Yet they are revealing enough in their own way.

A politician has many jobs - salesman, manager, negotiator, priest - but it is these moments, when the task is indeed to be politic, that are the purest test of his skills. He must find just the right words, the right gesture, not on an occasion or a theme of his own choosing, but as the event demands. It may be said that this requires a special talent; but mostly, as Vaclav Havel has written, it is a matter simply of good taste.

There are times when such symbolic choices may have substantive import, as coded signals of intent, overtures to enemies, warnings to friends. While M. Bouchard's ordeal is not of itself likely to swing many votes in the referendum, a failure to acknowledge it adequately on the part of his rivals might be just the slight that could. Hence the careful little sonnets of regard, Preston Manning even going so far as to declaim his in, at a guess, French.

But more often, as in the case of M. Bouchard, the significance of these performances attaches to our estimation of the man. We are called upon to judge whether the part has been well played, and in judging him, gain knowledge of ourselves. At such moments, society acts out a kind of drama through its political representatives, a formal dance, as precise and delicate as a minuet. The ancient Athenians debated political issues through the theatre, at which attendance was compulsory. In our parliamentary system, we make politics itself a theatre.

(Churchill, for one, insisted on this point. "The vitality and authority of the House of Commons," he said, as Parliament debated plans for its rebuilding after the war, "and its hold upon an electorate based upon universal suffrage, depend to no small extent upon its episodes and great moments, even upon its scenes and rows." That is why, among other things, he maintained that the Commons should have fewer seats than Members, that "there should be on great occasions a sense of crowd and urgency," the Members spilling into the aisles.)

The rules of such exchanges are fluid. While the infamous Ottawa Citizen headline ("Separatists in disarray as Bouchard loses leg") was denounced as an unseemly intrusion of political considerations into a personal tragedy, it was perfectly all right to adopt "Que l'on continue" as a separatist slogan. Or at least, all right for some: Jacques Parizeau was canny enough to deny publicly that there was any political message in M. Bouchard's note to his doctors, thus avoiding being seen to milk his misfortune. But then, he didn't have to. Others had done it for him.

Curiously, the clumsiest player in this drama has been the martyr himself. It wasn't that he was manipulative in attempting to orchestrate front-page media coverage of his return - it would have been just as calculating, if not more so, to have taken his seat unannounced - that left such a bad taste in people's mouths: It was that he was seen to be manipulative. His playing was without art. In the same vein is M. Bouchard's belated insistence that, yes, he had meant "continue" with the separatist cause. Even if this were true, it is not for M. Bouchard to endow it with political meaning. In seeking too obviously to exploit his own tragedy, he appears desperate, even pathetic, like a beggar rolling up his pant-leg for passers-by.

Even this doesn't always hold: All the condemnation of the Tories during the last election for running an ad featuring Jean Chretien's twisted features - butt of a thousand editorial cartoons and nightclub impressions - did not stop the old fraud from wringing an extra quart of sympathy out of the affair the next day. But then, an Olivier is permitted a few moments of bathos.