In 1937 I was in Paris and decided to call on Jean [sic] Marouzeau, Professor of course at the Sorbonne. He had very little time for me, because, as he told me proudly, he was off to Spitsbergen the next morning. He was not a very impressive-looking man, but he was a remarkable scholar (although I find some of his books a little dull), and above all he was a wonderful organizer. Where would we be without L'année philologique? But he put his organizing ability to even more practical use. He was in fact the head and organizer of the French Resistance in Paris. One day a pamphlet, through an error signed M., fell into the hands of the Germans. Being somewhat suspect already he was arrested. Fortunately a German officer, who was a classical scholar, succeeded in persuading the people in charge that as a classical scholar Marouzeau was obviously harmless and innocent; and so he was released.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, November 06, 2025
Jules Marouzeau
Otto Skutsch (1906-1990), "Recollections of Scholars I Have Known," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 94 (1992) 387-408 (at 406-407, footnote omitted):