French Diplomatic Service

The French Diplomatic Service appears in the account at a moment when military service was turning toward a civilian future. As Paris approached liberation, Romain Gary received an official invitation to apply for a permanent appointment as First Secretary. The offer made the Service a decisive destination in his life, but its arrival also exposed the influence his mother continued to exert from behind the scenes.

The Appointment and Its Circumstances

Romain Gary was preparing to parachute into southern France for liaison duties with the French Resistance movement. In the midst of his impatience to return to his mother, a letter from the French Foreign Office proposed that he enter the French Diplomatic Service as a First Secretary. The appointment was permanent, and the letter specified that it was offered in recognition of his exceptional services to the cause of the Liberation of France.

The offer surprised him because he knew no one at the French Foreign Office or in any civilian department, and had never told anyone about his mother’s ambitions for him. His literary success in England did not, in his view, account for admission without an examination. The official letter itself deepened the mystery: rather than sounding impersonal, it conveyed sympathy and something like personal friendliness, leaving him with the unfamiliar sensation that he was already known—or imagined—by its author.

The Mother Behind the Offer

The explanation was not an impersonal decision alone. Looking back over his mother’s recent letters, Romain Gary recognized the embarrassed, faintly sly note that had suggested she was arranging something. She had been approaching influential people and praising her son, quietly helping bring about the offer. Her earlier ambitions for his diplomatic career had thus become an intervention with a tangible result: an invitation to enter the Service without the usual examination.

The episode turns the appointment into another expression of their relationship. The letter seemed almost providential to Romain Gary, yet he detected his mother’s familiar hand behind what first appeared to be an inexplicable kindness. The French Diplomatic Service consequently stands both as a real institution opening a civilian career to a wartime serviceman and as the setting for his mother’s continuing effort to shape the future she had imagined for him.