Laudator Temporis Acti

Julian Jackson, De Gaulle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 11-12, with notes (expanded by me) on pp. 820-821:

In two careful sentences of his War Memoirs, de Gaulle wrote of his father: 'My father, a man of thought, culture, tradition, was imbued with a sense of the dignity of France. He made me discover its History.'³⁰ Later in life, when asked to name the person who had most influenced him, he would always unhesitatingly mention his father. Henri de Gaulle was remembered by his many pupils as charmingly vieille France, a gentle survivor from another age: distinguished and formal, undemonstrative and erudite. In this family, Gaulle later recalled, 'intellectual work was all that counted.'³¹ Henri passed on to his son a reverence for writers and the life of the mind. In London during the war de Gaulle ruminated one day on another possible existence:

The most wonderful job in the world would be as a librarian ... in a small provincial town, perhaps a municipal library in Brittany ... What calm! What a wonderful life! ... Suddenly, turning sixty, one begins to write an 80-page monograph entitled: 'Did Madame de Sévigné ever visit Pontivy?' ... One becomes increasingly frenetic, writing stinging letters to the deacon who quibbles about a date.³²

30. DGM [i.e. Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires (Gallimard, 2000)] 5.

31. Guy, En écoutant [i.e. Claude Guy, En écoutant de Gaulle. Journal 1946-1949 (Grasset, 1996)], 168.

32. François Coulet, Vertu des temps difficiles (Plon, 1967), 165-6.

The quotation in French:

Le plus beau métier, voyez-vous, c'est d'être bibliothécaire ... Je ne veux pas parler d'une grande bibliothèque, mais d'un poste de petit bibliothécaire, dans une petite ville de province, en Bretagne, une bibliothèque municipale ... Quel calme! Quelle belle vie! ... Et puis, brusquement, quand arrive la soixantaine, on se met à écrire une monographie de quatre-vingt pages: Mme de Sévigné est-elle passée par Pontivy? Alors, on devient frénétique, on envoie des lettres cinglantes au chanoine qui chicane sur une date, on persécute tout le monde, on n'arrête pas ... Oui, croyez-moi, bibliothécaire, c'est le plus beau des métiers.

Hat tip: Joel Eidsath.