When French Academician Charles Maurras was sentenced to life imprisonment for collaboration, one newspaper commented: "What a long time for an Immortal!'" Last week the moribund Academy, with 14 of 40 seats vacated by prison terms and natural deaths, muffed its biggest chance in 300 years for a new lease on life.
Up the Institut de France's rickety stairs, to the second-floor conference chamber, hobbled some two dozen venerable French "Immortals"—scholars with "glorious pasts and no futures." There, amid marble busts of bygone Academicians, they heard an earnest harangue from "Perpetual Secretary" Georges...
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