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> International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/christine-lagarde-stirs-wistful-memories-for-friends-in-holton-arms-class-of-74/2011/07/25/gIQAR8ldhI_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4f43ed55e009

For IMF’s Christine Lagarde and old friends, fond memories of year time at Holton-Arms School

July 29, 2011

In May 1974, Rep. William S. Cohen, a Republican freshman on the House Judiciary Committee, was gathering evidence that led to his eventual vote to impeach President Richard M. Nixon. But outside the Watergate hearings room, Cohen needed a French speaker to respond to all the partisan mail from his French Canadian constituents in Maine.

He was in luck. A French exchange student — a senior at the private Holton-Arms School in Bethesda — had just begun interning in his office that month.

The internship formed an important part of the teenager’s year in America and would ultimately furnish an only-in-Washington coincidence: The congressman-and-future U.S. defense secretary was passing off scut work to the future head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde.

…

Within the social stratosphere of Holton-Arms, where President Gerald R. Ford’s daughter, Susan Ford, was also a student, Lagarde hung out mostly with a small band of outsiders, among them: Maggie Quiroga Mainor, the Argentine daughter of an international relations executive, and the late Gabrielle “Gabby” Geaslin Swartz, the daughter of a purported CIA operative.

Lagarde herself had an unusual background, which she alluded to in a mostly fictional story that she wrote for the Holton-Arms literary journal Scroll. The piece, titled “Noblesse Oblige,” drew on her mother’s roots in the French nobility during the 1800s.

…

William Cohen still remembers the intern who read and responded to his constituents’ letters in French. As for Lagarde, she especially remembers Nixon’s foul mouth.

“I was being allowed to listen to the Nixon tapes, and it was like, ‘Holy cow.’ The language was not exactly pure,” she says. “The internship made me think about checks and balances. It was my first injection of political life, and to get that at age 18 leaves a mark on you.”

http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/the-rise-of-christine-lagarde-to-lead-the-international-monetary-fund-a-886728-2.html

How Christine Lagarde Beat the Odds to Head IMF

March 05, 2013

Her mother, a strict Catholic school teacher, stressed good manners and was convinced that she had aristocratic roots. Lagarde's father was a university professor. But throughout her life Lagarde's mother was obsessed with the notion of being part of the aristocracy. She conducted genealogical research and, when she was convinced that she had discovered her roots, had a signet ring made with her family's coat of arms. "Whether true or not," says Lagarde, "she had that sort of dignity, that elegance about her."

—

When Lagarde was 17, she spent a year at Holton Arms, a private girls' school in Bethesda, near Washington, where she lived with an American host family. At the school, she wrote an essay about her mother titled "Noblesse Oblige."

In the essay, she described how her mother had once asked her and her three brothers, Luc, Rémi and Olivier, to come into the living room and sit down. Lagarde was 12 at the time, and as the eldest of the four siblings, she was the first to whom her mother turned when she said: "You are now old enough to understand what I have to tell to you. I am an aristocrat, a countess, which will make you a countess and you a count to be, as soon as you turn 18. And when I am dead, you will be a countess and a count."

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