Word: dutourd
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...Intellectual Andre Maurois: "It's a good thing to suppress the orals, which are fatal for the timid. An individual can express himself fully in writing, give a survey of his true value on an exam paper, but be incapable of developing his ideas aloud." Added Author Jean Dutourd: "The reform pleases me, for it seems to be a step toward the suppression-pure and simple-of this entire monstrous examination...
...months the taunt as well as the talk of Paris, Dutourd's book does not explain anything-it merely accuses. Zola himself might have been proud of its polemic passion; few Americans will fail to be moved -or to understand France better-reading this cry from the heart of an enraged patriot. On Dutourd's lips, the famed French proverb becomes: "To understand all is to forgive nothing...
Cockroaches & Poltroons. In June 1940 Jean Dutourd was 20, and for all of two weeks a pseudo soldier in a pseudo army in a pseudo fight. He and his fellow soldiers had a shrugging attitude of callow "realism," which is "a polite translation of the word cowardice." He describes how after the German breakthrough he and five buddies wandered around Brittany like truant schoolboys, cadging six meals a day from the peasants, who treated them as heroes. Only one farmer told them off: "Get out! If you had fought, you'd be fed now instead of having...
What had happened to France since the days in 1914, when the Germans also threatened a breakthrough and 6,000 reinforcements were rushed in hastily commandeered Paris taxicabs to the Marne, where they helped to stem the Boche tide? Dutourd says simply: in 1940 "the generals were stupid and the men did not want to be killed." From Commander in Chief Gamelin down, with the honorable exception of De Gaulle ("one great soul"), the generals were "doddering numskulls." "cockroaches," "poltroons." They "had the instruments of victory in their hands. What nobody realized was this: they were longing to change their...
...Dutourd soon found himself imprisoned in a vast aircraft hangar, along with 8,000 other Frenchmen who lolled about admiring the conquering Germans for their elegance, and green with envy of their boots. (In a devastating aside, Dutourd suggests that the money poured into the Maginot Line might better have been spent on boots for the French army.) It was assumed that the war was nearly over, that the Germans would send the prisoners home on free railroad passes. But Dutourd got away. He carries modesty about his three-year stint with the Resistance to the point of devoting half...