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If, as seems possible, he calculated that the French people would be shocked into calling him back on his own terms, he was grievously mistaken. In the October 1947 municipal elections his newly formed Rally of the French People won 40% of the popular vote, and for a few brief weeks it seemed that the National Assembly might have no choice but to submit to "le grand Charlie" and his parliamentary reforms. But with the aid of anti-Gaullist President Vincent Auriol, the politicians headed De Gaulle off. In 1954, disgusted and disillusioned, De Gaulle publicly severed all ties with his parliamentary followers, withdrew from direct competition for power in "this republic which I picked up out of the mud."
The Cardplayer. Since then De Gaulle has lived in self-imposed retreat in a towered stone house at Colombey. Thickening at the waist and beset by eye trouble -he had a cataract operation a year ago and still wears heavy glasses -he has until recently devoted most of his time to writing his memoirs, in the afternoons striding rapidly through the nearby Foret Gauloise, where Vercingetorix played hide-and-seek with Caesar's army 2,000 years ago. A fervid bridge player in his army days, the general is a devotee of a French form of solitaire called reussite, plays as many as 18 games a day and keeps careful statistics on how the cards come up, to guide him in future play.
"Conditions, Monsieur?" Once a week, in his six-year-old Citroen, he is driven to the shabby Left Bank office building at 5 Rue de Solferino that houses the Paris headquarters of the Rally of the French People. There, in a sparsely furnished office, De Gaulle receives representatives of almost every current of political opinion, French and foreign. (Among his past callers: U.S. Ambassador to France Amory Houghton, Soviet Ambassador Sergei Vinogradov, French Communist Boss Jacques Duclos, Right-Wing Rabble-Rouser Pierre Poujade.) Somehow De Gaulle's visitors come away with the realization that he has learned more from the conversation than they have. A few months ago crafty Independent Leader Roger Duchet, feeling that the time might be ripe for a deal, went to 5 Rue de Solferino with a pointed question: If the conservative Independents agreed to throw their support behind a drive to have De Gaulle recalled to power, what would be the general's conditions? "Conditions. Monsieur?" boomed De Gaulle. "There can be no conditions for saving France!"
Rhetoric & Practice. Judging by such oracular pronouncements and De Gaulle's obviously unshaken belief that his day is not done, many Frenchmen ,see the aging De Gaulle as a pompous and amusing figure deluded by grandeur. But his memoirs -which French literary critics have compared to the works of Thucydides. Julius Caesar and Sir Winston Churchill -reveal him as a profoundly sophisticated man with a far-ranging mind, a shrewd insight into people and an ironic sense of humor. ("I am fed up with all generals, including myself," he once said.) Behind the accusations of egomania, argue his admirers, lies a failure to recognize that De Gaulle is a dedicated man whose entire strength, passion and intelligence have been devoted to his conception of France as a nation that "is not really herself unless in the front rank."