person
Paul Déroulède
Déroulède
also: Деруледа, Дерулед
French nationalist poet and founder of the revanchist Ligue des patriotes (1882); named by Zhirkov alongside Boulanger and Grévy as a Parisian topic of the day that the fraudulently cosmopolitan Boiseau has never heard of.
Reading notes
- Life's Trials §35 Vive la France!... Long live Déroulède!
Paul Déroulède (1846-1914) was a French nationalist poet and politician, founder of the revanchist Ligue des patriotes in 1882, a prominent agitator for war with Germany and frequent newspaper subject in the mid-1880s; Popov's delirious cry -- shouted in French, apropos of nothing in his own situation -- is Chekhov's punchline image of a mind so overwhelmed by meaningless repetition (rubles, kopecks, percentages) that it snaps into equally meaningless, borrowed sloganeering as he is carried off to the hospital.