Gentlemen, here one does not lie!
From an essay by French Bishop Jean-Pierre Batut comes a message that applies to our own time.
“‘Gentlemen, here one does not lie!’ In French high schools of long ago, even sixth grade students, barely twelve years old, were called ‘gentlemen.’ And this sentence, ‘Gentlemen, here one does not lie,’ is the first that Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger claimed to remember from his German teacher at the Lycée Montaigne at the end of the 1930s. In dangerous times when Nazi propaganda, which had made falsehood its foundation and truth its enemy, reigned in the land of Goethe, this injunction from a German professor marked a young Jewish student forever.”
If any reader unfamiliar with the story of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger might find it incongruous that a twelve year old Jewish boy would grow up to be a Catholic Cardinal, I recommend the recent movie made for French television The Jewish Cardinal (available on Netflix).