Word: barged
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Provence village of Bargème is scented by lavender from the nearby Alpine foothills, and its pastures are dotted with herds of grazing sheep. At the start of the 1960s, it was smaller (pop. 65) and, if anything, more charmingly bucolic than it had been in the Middle Ages. The few visitors to the town, an hour's drive northwest of Cannes, usually came to view its medieval ruins-a chateau, a church, towers and gates that had decayed into an exquisite stone latticework. In 1961, Bargème found a benefactress-or rather, Madame Germaine De Maria...
...desire now is a modest retreat where I can read and reflect. I'd like to be able to chat with a shepherd in a field at sundown and munch hard-boiled eggs." With that, she asked the town fathers to let her pay for the restoration of Bargème's ruins and take up residence in the town...
Battering Ram. Having beautified old Bargème, la Patronne became worried about property development around it. To prevent real estate sharks from cashing in on the town's new attractiveness, she persuaded André Malraux's Culture Ministry in Paris to classify the town as a historical site, thus forbidding new structures on lots of less than 2½ acres. The decree hit Bargème like a battering ram: many villagers, it turned out, had hoped to parcel off their own land at premium prices to wealthy Parisian weekenders. Led by fighting-mad Mayor Isnard...
...give a hoot about any culture minister," said Isnard. "We are masters in our own village." He told Madame De Maria that her "presence in Bargème has been a catastrophe for this village." Last week he issued a decree of his own: if Malraux's decision is not reversed, "we will make Bargeme as ugly a village as we know how." As a start, he threatened to paint every building in the village red, blue and green...
...much heat and pressure that all organic traces they once contained have been turned to shapeless specks of carbon. One notable exception is a hard, black, ancient rock found near Gunflint Lake in western Ontario, which somehow escaped this rough treatment. In the magazine Science, Paleontologist Elso S. Barg-hoorn-of Harvard and the late Geologist Stanley A. Tyler of the University of Wisconsin describe the remains of microscopic organisms that lived in that "Gunflint chert" - an impure silica -about 2 billion years ago, 1,800 million years before the earliest dinosaurs...