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With his sister (now a nun). Pinay got his early schooling at St. Symphorien. He was a lackluster scholar: at ten he announced to his father: "I was made not to obey, but to command." The principal of a boarding school told papa Pinay one day: "Frankly, it's a waste of time and money." At 16 Pinay's formal schooling ended and he was shipped off to a relative's metallurgical plant to learn something about business.
Compulsory military service and World War I interrupted. In September 1914, Pinay was a sergeant in charge of a 75-mm. gun crew on the Aisne front. During a ferocious German attack, Pinay stuck to his gun and turned back a cavalry charge; a few minutes later he was struck down by a direct shell hit which almost severed his right arm. He lay on an operating table in Chartres military hospital, a nurse standing by with the ether cone and the scalpels, when a remarkable coincidence saved his arm. The doctor who planned to amputate was transferred, and his replacement thought he could avoid amputation. After seven painful operations the arm was patched together. (Today it occasionally gives Pinay acute pain and drives him to the soothing waters of Aix-les-Bains. With the two fingers that still work, he can handle knife & fork, and he writes only with difficulty.) It was not until eight years later that the slow process of French bureaucracy provided Pinay with his reward—the Medaille militaire, France's highest accolade for bravery in war.
Out of uniform, a young man with a crippled arm, a feeble education and no visible means of support, Pinay looked a poor risk for success. But there were few young men about; they were dying at the front in the great hemorrhage from which France, almost four decades later, has not yet recovered. To a St. Chamond tanner named Fouletier, Pinay seemed a good prospect to marry his daughter Marguerite and become heir apparent to his leather business. In the customary way—through mutual friends —a marriage was arranged for one day in April 1917. Pinay showed an aptitude for the tannery business, and was able to take it over when his father-in-law died five years later.
Steel for the Spirit. The Pinays prospered, their family grew (two daughters, then a son), and the leather profits bought a solid ten-room house and costly Empire and Louis XVI furniture. But Pinay's happy home life ended abruptly in 1928, in a way which, those who know him believe, may have added the final, necessary strain of steel to Antoine Pinay's makeup. His wife fell victim to an incurable mental disease. For the past 22 years she has lived almost continuously in a mental home.
Left lonely and shaken by his wife's illness, Pinay was grateful when the people of St. Chamond invited him to be their mayor. He built the town a 300-bed hospital, when materials and construction workers were almost impossible to come by. When the treasury got low he did not increase taxes, but scraped around for fresh ways to raise revenue—loans, housekeeping economies. When professional idlers came to town hall in search of handouts,
Pinay would find them jobs; they went to work or moved on.