On 6 February 1948, Anne died at the age of twenty after catching bronchitis. The family had lived with the knowledge that the weak immune systems of children with Down’s Syndrome made them vulnerable to infection. But Anne’s death was a terrible blow. The curé noted in his diary: ‘I found the General collapsed in awful grief. He said to me: “I am a man annihilated. You decide everything: the time and the day. I want a funeral as they are done at Colombey.”’79 De Gaulle wrote to his other daughter Elisabeth, who was at that time living in Africa: Anne died in my arms with her mother and Madame
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