Paris: It is a symphony of creams, pale yellows and subtle shades of orange. Cheese- makers from across France for the first time have set aside old quarrels to bring together exactly 1,000 cheeses for an exhibit in Paris.

In the land of the world's most impassioned eaters of cheese, the exhibition verges on a tribute. Set in a Paris park by the Louvre museum, where an autumn breeze carries a smell of flowers and of greenery, the heady and familiar odour of strong French cheese exudes from the entry of the show.

"Cheese is more than mere food for the French," said moustachioed Jacques Vernier, one of two venerable experts who selected the 1,000 pieces on show. "Cheese is a part of our personality, cheese is part of our heritage. Cheese is a national treasure," he said.

"Cheese is as important as the fountains at Versailles Palace," he went on.

The show entitled 'France of 1,000 cheeses' dates the first cheese to Neolithic times and exhibits its delights region by region, explaining the differences between the country's eight cheese families, the different rinds, milk and refining involved.

"Pieces 10,000 years old were found in the Jura Mountains of Eastern France," said Yves Boutonnat, who heads the CIDIL dairy industry statistics and information office.

Decades ago, lamenting his compatriots' legendary lack of discipline, General Charles de Gaulle quipped, "how can you govern a country with 246 different varieties of cheeses". Winston Churchill is said to have made a similar parallel between the French and their cheeses.

But as the age old individually crafted cheeses from tiny Normandy valleys and Alpine villages are matched by a growing number of industrially made imitations produced for supermarket shelves, the number of varieties has swollen to well over 1,000, Vernier said.

The exhibition aims to bridge the tension between the homemade and the industrially produced in the interests of a food product doing well both on the domestic market and overseas.

According to a study by CIDIL, cheese consumption in France rose 1.2 per cent in 2001 against the year 2000, with each French person eating 24.5 kilos (54 pounds) of cheese.

The favourite cheese in France with a 20 per cent market share is grated Swiss-style emmental or traditional Comte, itself the biggest seller of the top-of-the market French AOC cheeses.