The General’s startling intensity was anathema to his smooth patrician urbanity. He told Churchill that he was ‘concerned at the spiritual look’ in de Gaulle’s eyes.38 He afterwards recounted, with many embellishments in the retelling, that de Gaulle had compared himself to Joan of Arc. The truth was more complicated. When Roosevelt told de Gaulle he could not recognize him because he had not been elected, de Gaulle replied that Joan of Arc had not been elected either but that her legitimacy had come from taking arms against the invader. The two men were talking an entirely different language:
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