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Provoked beyond endurance by this solemn hauteur, a Frenchman recently burst out: "He's pleased with the way things have gone, isn't he? Then why doesn't he ever laugh?" To this question, De Gaulle himself supplied an answer years ago: "Prestige cannot exist without mystery, for people revere little what they know too well. All cults have their tabernacles, and no great man is great in the eyes of his servants."
Some Signal Service. De Gaulle began early to dream of greatness. From his father, "a thoughtful, cultivated, traditional man," a wounded veteran of the Franco-Prussian War who taught philosophy at a Jesuit school in Paris, De Gaulle acquired his absorbing passion for French history. And from childhood on, God's omnipotence has been intertwined in De Gaulle's mind with the greatness of France. As an adolescent, he conceived of France as "the princess in the fairy stories or the Madonna in the frescoes," was convinced that "the interest of life consisted in one day rendering her some signal service, and that I would have the occasion to do so."
Inheriting a scholarly tradition on both sides of his family, blessed with a retentive memory and an analytical intelligence, he sharpened his mind on the classics, ancient and modern—an exercise that makes him one of the few statesmen alive who can bolster an argument with references to Heraclitus and Henri Bergson. His copybook at Saint-Cyr bore Victor Hugo's maxim: "Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life."
Along with first-class intellectual training, De Gaulle acquired from his mother, a descendant of Scottish and Irish refugees who came to France with the fleeing Stuarts, a highly individualistic and severe religious faith. His devout Catholicism is of the kind that has a hatred of waste, ostentation or levity. It is also intensely private. Recalling in his memoirs the occasion during World War II when F.D.R. sent Cardinal Spellman to try to convince the Free French of the rightness of a particular aspect of U.S. policy, De Gaulle writes: "This eminently pious prelate approached the problems of this world with an evident care to serve only the cause of God. But the greatest devotion cannot prevent business from being business."
Friend of Petain. Entering France's famed military academy of Saint-Cyr at 18, Cadet de Gaulle was unfashionably churchgoing, personally reticent, suitably erudite, but already militarily unorthodox. His hulking, outsized (6 ft. 4 in.) body earned him the nickname "the big asparagus." He graduated among the top 15 in his class, had his choice of regiments. His pick: the 33rd Infantry, commanded by Colonel Henri Philippe Petain.