Yesterday, I posted about Nixon's "final" press conference. Six years later he became President - after a short withdrawal from public life. Charles de Gaulle also retired from public life, only to return - finally as President of the Fifth Republic. In fact he retired so often that - as an entry in Wikipedia says (and which appears word for word in a disturbing number of other webpages!) "Colombey became widely used as a political metaphor for a statesman's temporary withdrawal from political life, until his country would come calling for him again."