Word: montalembert
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Bowler & Pince Nez. Bidault comes from central France, the son of an insurance man. He taught himself to read at six, and was educated by the Jesuits. Bidault was deeply influenced by a scholarship prize he won at the age of 15: a book on Montalembert, the 19th century political philosopher who strove to fuse Roman Catholicism with Liberalism. Bidault went on to the Sorbonne, then to teaching (history and geography) in a lycee. In his 30s Bidault looked so young that a proctor at the school once reprimanded him for smoking; he took to wearing a bowler...
...best answer came from Eton's headmaster, Robert Birley, who traced the words back to Montalembert's De l'Avenir Politique de I'Angleterre, published in 1855. According to Count Montalembert, the Duke of Wellington, returning to Eton in his old age, exclaimed: "It is here that the battle of Waterloo was won." Obviously the playing fields had been tucked in later. Triumphantly, the seventh Duke wrote another letter to the Times last week: "The only authority for attributing the phrase to Wellington is a Frenchman writing three years after the Duke's death . . . Wellington...