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Finally, "France was handed back to us, but not the taste for living in it. The men who are modeling the face of France today are the same who lost the war of 1940," and for them Dutourd reserves his supreme contempt: "France, this aged, unhappy mother, this pauper to whose rags still cling tattered bits of the fineries of the past—the frayed fleurs-de-lys, the tarnished eagles, the plucked cock—this parent you have forced to go begging at all the gates of the world, who is being kicked out of Africa and Asia, who is being spat at by the guttersnipes of Cairo, whose last resources are dropping from her rheumatic hands—this France will one day drag you, men of fifty, before the bar of history . . . The lost generation is not our generation, it is yours."
Requiem for La Gloire. In part, Dutourd's book is a requiem for la gloire and the waning power of a demoted France: "[My heart] bleeding from a thousand wounds, calling with all its will for a little seriousness and a little glory ..." And in part the book is an almost covert expression of hope. Dutourd thinks that "one genius and ten honorable men" could still put France back on her feet.
In this hope Dutourd may be as far removed from reality as the phony "realists" he denounces. The very symbol he chooses for the glory of yesteryear is shaky. For the troops who were rushed to the Marne in taxicabs not only signified courage; they signified desperate improvisation in a desperate mess. Perhaps in a grim and homely sense the symbol is correct. As any tourist knows, those Paris taxis are rickety, hazardous—fun, perhaps, but unstable and expensive—and the meter ticks away, inexorable as fate.