Word: acad
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week the dispute came to open warfare. The first barrage was laid down by Biologist Jean Rostand, 65, who reputedly knows more about frogs than any man alive, and who had been elected to Herriot's vacant seat in the Académie Française. Wearing the academy's braided uniform and cocked hat and with a sword dangling awkwardly at his side, Rostand, as custom requires, used his acceptance speech to eulogize the academician whose place he took. Herriot's last moments, according "to certain witnesses," said Rostand, were not "in harmony with...
...only a great beauty but a great lady, among whose descendants are some of France's leading critics, writers and scientists, including the present family head, Maurice, Due de Broglie and his brother, Nobel Prizewinner Prince Louis de Broglie, both atomic physicists and members of the Académic Francaise...
Died. Maurice-Edmond Sailland, 83, bald, rotund (220 Ibs.) Gallic gourmet better known by his self-styled title Prince Curnonsky, founder (1928) of France's famed Académie des Gastronomes and head of 27 gastronomical societies, prolific culinary writer (France Gastronomique, in 28 volumes); after accidentally falling from a window of his fourth-floor apartment; in Paris...
...only surprises Cocteau prepared for his entry into the academy, however, were his costume, an especially fancy Académie uniform tailored (by Lanvin) of midnight blue instead of the traditional green with gold braid, and his sword (by Cartier) with a hilt modeled to represent a profile of Oedipus. In his initiation speech, Cocteau turned the flow of his conversation on the Immortals with a respect tempered only gently by the old glint of satiric impertinence. "The time is coming when one will no longer be able to read or write, when a few mandarins will whimper secrets...
Somberly dubbed an Immortal, Cocteau promised: "Entrance to the Académie is the last scandal I will create...