Even the more phlegmatic Pompidou was worried. Although having no official position at this time, Pompidou remained in close contact with de Gaulle. After seeing him in October, he wrote to him in terms calculated to appeal to his sense of providential destiny: ‘If Pericles had been abandoned or imprisoned, it is the Athenians one would blame: if Pericles had abandoned Athens in the thick of the Peloponnesian War, it is them that history would blame.’
