It was translated into French during his lifetime but not into English until 1551, some years after his death.
This shift in attitude towards the French happened in my lifetime.
In 1991 he was awarded an honorary César, the French Oscar, for his lifetime achievements as an actor.
This contemporary adulation of de Gaulle should not let us forget how hated he was by many sections of French society during his lifetime.
Nadal's coach and uncle, Toni Nadal, played down the incident, saying "the French can wait a lifetime" because Nadal, a six-time winner of the French Open, would never test positive for doping.
Jim Veilleux, a 56-year-old computer consultant from Mill Valley, Calif., echoed our own sentiments, telling us that, despite a lifetime of French lessons, "I felt I had to come here to really learn the language".
Back on that sunny spring afternoon in 2000, his hat-trick of tries brought Ireland their first win on French soil in the lifetime of most of their players.
Although she continued to receive a small pension from the French government throughout her lifetime, Marie-Louise chose to pursue a career as a nurse and was awarded the Legion of Honour for her medical services during World War II.
A 19th-century French doctor, who made a lifetime study of absinthism, chronicled its symptoms: "sudden delirium, epileptic attacks, vertigo, hallucinatory delirium".
Described in his lifetime by a French critic as the first 'English painter of universal significance' and still commanding enormous prices for works of unrivalled purity, elegance and poetry, this pioneer of modernism currently rates not a single work in the Tate Modern display.
