Emmanuelle Haim laments tragic loss
mainThe conductor Emmanuelle Haim has posted a notice of mourning for the development director of Le Concert d’Astrée, Céline Foucaut, who has died of cancer at the age of 44, leaving two small children.
Emmanuelle writes: Since 2009, Céline has been making invisible connections between people and creating beautiful, new encounters. Without her, the Concert d’Astrée would not be the same. We think of all her loved ones, her children Gabrielle and Valentin, her companion Yann, her parents and brothers and we associate ourselves with their immense pain.
Charles De Gaulle said it best: “Cementaries are full of irreplaceable people.”
It is easy to see that Charles De Gaulle was not Oscar Wilde.
Quite apart from the insensitivity and the utter lack of tact under the circumstances, the attribution is wrong and the quotation incomplete.
If you knew the first thing about Charles de Gaulle, you’d understand why he of all people was most unlikely to utter such a thought. Despite his projected aloofness and abrasive rejection of nincompoops, de Gaulle had a deep sense of decency.
It was Georges Clemenceau who made the phrase famous, although he probably did not coin it.
It reads:
“Les cimetières sont pleins de gens irremplaçables, qui ont tous été remplacés.”
Françoise Giroud, co-founder of L’Express, acutely perceptive journalist and writer, and for a brief spell in the mid-’70s a brilliant minister of culture under Giscard d’Estaing, changed it in a non-paradoxical way to express her grief at a growing number of close personal losses:
“Les cimetières sont pleins de gens irremplaçables, et qu’on n’a pas remplacés.”