"Only the mediocre are always at their best." -- Jean Giraudoux
Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux (October 29, 1882 – January 31, 1944) was a French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright. He is considered among the most important French dramatists of the period between World War I and World War II. His work is noted for its stylistic elegance and poetic fantasy. Giraudoux's dominant theme is the relationship between man and woman...or in some cases, between man and some unattainable ideal.
"A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe; a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.""A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.""As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.""Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.""Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.""Faithful women are all alike, they think only of their fidelity, never of their husbands.""I have been a woman for fifty years, and I've never yet been able to discover precisely what it is I am.""I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.""I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.""It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for.""Men should only believe half of what women say. But which half?""One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.""The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.""The secret of success is sincerity.""There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.""There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people.""There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.""Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.""We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.""When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome."
Giraudoux was born in Bellac, Haute-Vienne; his father, Léger Giraudoux, worked for the Ministry of Transport. Giraudoux studied at the Lycée Lakanal in Paris and, upon graduation, traveled extensively in Europe. After his return to France in 1910, Giraudoux accepted a position with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With the outbreak of World War I, he served with honour and in 1915 became the first writer ever to be awarded the wartime Legion of Honour.
He married in 1918 and in the subsequent inter-war period produced the majority of his writing. He first achieved literary success through his novels, notably Siegfried et le Limousin (1922) and Eglantine (1927), but it is his plays that gained him international renown. An ongoing collaboration with actor and theater director Louis Jouvet, beginning in 1928 with Jouvet's radical streamlining of Siegfried for the stage, stimulated his writing.
He is buried in the Cimetière de Passy in Paris.
Giraudoux served as a juror with Florence Meyer Blumenthal in awarding the Prix Blumenthal, a grant given between 1919-1954 to painters, sculptors, decorators, engravers, writers, and musicians.
