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The Inner Life. Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle has traveled a long way since he was "born in Lille, 57 years ago, the son of a philosophy professor. He early acquired a love of reading and learning, and at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, where he has a country retreat 125 miles southeast of Paris, reading is still his main diversion. He reads and rereads the French classics, such writers as Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo.
His life at Colombey is the simple one of a dedicated, single-minded man. He gets up at 8, breakfasts on café au lait, brown bread, a little butter and jam, then tackles his mail and newspapers. The food served at lunch is simple and the wine is an inexpensive vin rosé served from a carafe, but the meal is a leisurely one, lasting one and a half or two hours, and topped off by brandy, cigars and conversation. Malraux or Soustelle is often there, and nearly every top Government man from Ramadier down has been to Colombey at least once in the last eight months. Mme. de Gaulle is the ideal wife for a dedicated man: devoted and self-effacing. (His three grown children live elsewhere.) When the General is engrossed with one visitor, she chats with the others.
On election night in October, De Gaulle was in the tower which he uses for a study, playing solitaire. De Gaulle snapped the radio on occasionally for early election returns, but went to bed at 2 o'clock with no clear idea of the results and left his telephone receiver off the hook. Next morning he got congratulatory calls from people who had been trying to get in touch with him all night.
Since the flight from Bordeaux to England on June 18, 1940 which made him famous, he has been an enigma to many. Once, however, he painted a revealing self-portrait : a passage in his remarkable, prophetic book, The Army of the Future,* published by Colonel de Gaulle in 1934. He wrote: "The depth, the singularity, the self-sufficiency of a man made for great deeds is not popular except at critical times. Although when in contact with him one is conscious of a superiority which compels respect, he is seldom liked. Moreover, his faculties, shaped for heroic feats, despise the pliability, the intrigues and the parade through which most brilliant careers are achieved in peacetime. And so he would be condemned to emasculation or corruption, if he lacked the grim impulse of ambition to spur him on. It is not, to be sure, that the passion for rank and honors, which is only careerism, possess him, but it is beyond doubt the hope of playing a great role in great events!"
"Ah, Great People." Is that exalted attitude a preface to dictatorial tenden cies? Perhaps; but De Gaulle understands the danger of dictatorship well. He has said: "What is dictatorship? Doubtless its first steps may seem attractive. Amid the enthusiasm of some and the resignation of others, amid the rigor of the order which it imposes and with the help of spectacular staging and one-way propaganda, dictatorship can at first assume a dynamic aspect which contrasts agreeably with the anarchy which preceded it. But it is the fate of dictatorship to exaggerate. . . . The nation becomes a machine which the master progressively and frantically accelerates. ... In the end the spring breaks and the grandiose edifice crumbles in sorrow and blood."