Word: taine
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Last week Pierre Laval came to judgment. With him came none of the dreadful pity, the sense of terrible duty that had been in every Frenchman's heart during the trial, death sentence and commutation to life imprisonment, of old Marshal Henri Pétain. The elimination of Pierre Laval, a necessary chore, might have been a satisfying vengeance. He made it a shameful farce...
...peasant of genius. He took the measure of the High Court of Justice in Paris with a shrewd and baleful eye. As his treasonable acts were recited, the arch-collaborator of Vichyfrance calculatingly sized up the opposition: white-haired André Mornet, prosecutor of Mata Hari and Pétain; red-robed Judge Pierre Mongibeaux, who had sentenced the Marshal two months ago; the jury of resistance leaders and parliamentarians...
France's everpresent, ever-haunting awareness of national guilt would not down: the Court had to agree that Laval would "not be reproached" for his prewar career, for complicity in the 1940 armistice, for the law by which the National Assembly armed Pétain and Laval with power and set up the Vichy regime...
...sexagenarian, grey, thick-set Pertinax will be busy: he will also edit the weekly L'Europe Nouvelle, as he did after he split with Echo in 1938 over its appeasement policies. He intends to update his best-selling U.S. book, Gravediggers of France (Pétain, Gamelin, Reynaud, Daladier). Then at last it can be published, perhaps, in the country where the graves were...
Henri Philippe Pétain, under sentence of life imprisonment (commuted from death), was voted by the French Academy to be no longer one of their immortals...