The first one just happened to be there, a little like
Everest or the General’s nose
(remarkable eminences, both)
and also happened to be me, a daunted witness
of that weird Parisian ritual of the Sixties,
a de Gaulle press conference, summoned
since I was in Paris at the time
and had been his (or one of his) paraphrasts of prose
concerned with what the General preferred to call (un
translatably) la chose allemande.
The occasion was particularly rare because
Mme de Gaulle was at his side and
(even rarer) willing to answer
questions, provided of course such inquiries observed
the mandates of Presidential privacy. Of course.
But after several anodine
approximations of politesse
on the part of the Fourth Estate, a Herald-Tribune
reporter brought proceedings to a heart-stopping halt:
“What do you regard, Mme de Gaulle,
as the chief significance of life?” And with a sad smile,
after a moment, Yvonne de Gaulle
(whose life had after all included
the death of a soldier son in that same German Thing)
flabbergasted us all by speaking three syllables:
“A penis.” And with an interval
of no more than five seconds, a hand
(with perhaps military promptitude) descended
on her shoulder: “I believe the English word you mean,
ma chérie, is pronounced “Hap-pi-ness.”
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