Word: abbe
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...weekly drawing of the French National Lottery one day last month, the winning ticket was No. 301,207. To the holder of that stub went 13,000,000 tax-free francs ($37,143). The lucky man was a Roman Catholic priest, Sylvan Grandmougin, 52, Abbé of Attignéville...
That kind of good news travels fast. Soon a swarm of handout seekers buzzed around him, ten visitors a day from outlying districts, "a thousand letters a day from people all over France, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium." The abbé lit out for Paris, partly to escape, partly to pick up his fat check and two second-hand Citroens for 1,500,000 francs...
Back home again, the abbé has since spent nearly a third of the money, some 4,000,000 francs, repairing and replastering the three churches of his parishes, decking out the one at Attignéville with new stained-glass windows. Further plans: a youth center for his parishioners and a dressmaking workshop...
Massenet's Manon is a French opera of more refined and delicate charms than Puccini's booming, Italianate Manon Lescaut, although both are based on the same Abbé Prevost novel. It is a big opera, but for best effect it needs a production with the intimacy of opéra comique-one reason it has never been much more than a singers' showpiece at the Metropolitan (last performance: 1948). Last week, as the only new production of the New York City Opera's spring season, Massenet's Manon got the kind of performance...
...Abbé Gaston is so clearly on the side of the angels that his worst enemy is none of those that Novelist Marshall sets up, but Novelist Marshall himself. In To Every Man a Penny, goodness becomes a cloying surfeit, and sentiment runs over into Parisian bathos...