Content area
Full Text
WISE, LEARNED, AFFECTIONATE, Georges May was to many like a much-admired older brother. He died on 28 February 2003, at the age of eighty-two, leaving the warmest memories in the minds of many who knew him as teacher, mentor, administrator, and colleague. My own friendship with Georges goes back to the immediate postwar period, more than half a century ago, when he began, with his habitual modesty, good humor, and total professional dedication, what was to be a lifelong brilliant career at Yale University.
There was nothing parochial about Georges May, a cosmopolitan by temperament and circumstances, even though his professional life was almost entirely played out at Yale, where he quickly established himself as a preeminent scholar of the French Enlightenment. Starting as an assistant professor in 1947 with a fresh Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, he rose to become Sterling Professor of French, and he occupied that most distinguished chair from 1971 to 1990, the year of his retirement. During those years he imposed himself not only as an outstanding undergraduate and graduate teacher and as an authority on Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but also as a highly efficient and spirited administrator, first as dean of Yale College (1963-71), then as provost of the university (1979-81). Enjoying the encouragement and trust of Henri Peyre, Yale's prestigious chairman of the French department at the beginning of his career, and later of successive presidents (Kingman Brewster, Hanna Gray, Bart Giamatti), Georges May was appreciated for his loyalty to the university, his gracious and thoughtful manner, his wit, and the civilized twinkle in his eyes.
Honors came to him in profusion, though he neither sought them nor exaggerated their significance. A Guggenheim Fellow twice, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as to the American Philosophical Society, decorated chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, elected president of the American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies, and appointed chairman of the board of directors of the American Council of Learned Societies. Georges May was also awarded a number of honorary degrees. But with characteristic skepticism, he did not set great store by any of these distinctions. His pride was in quality performance.
The death of his wife, Martha, a...