Word: berniers
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While onlookers placed their mental bets, a slight, pretty, 20-year-old Canadian named Sylvie Bernier found a new consistency to support her delicate and precise style, and took the lead midway through the competition. McCormick, who had overrotated and made a splashing entry on her eighth dive, a reverse 2½ somersault with a tuck, which had given her trouble before, had a chance to win the gold with a superlative score on her tenth and last dive. ("Divin' is just landin' on your head ten times out of ten," she had said after the preliminary round...
...Olivier Bernier...
Lafayette's gallant service to the young nation helped contribute to the special affection that still binds the two countries. Yet as Olivier Bernier, an American author born of French parents, points out in this stirring biography, the French did not always have special affection for Lafayette...
Throughout his New World adventure, however, Lafayette remained curiously immune to the principles he was fighting for. "It had not yet occurred to him that democracy was for export," writes Bernier. The soldier returned to France an enthusiastic supporter of the ancien régime. Yet as the toast of Paris salons, he met some of the new egalitarian thinkers of the day and became a genuine convert to the cause of democracy. His new ideals and his ever growing popularity drew him into the French Revolution, and at 31 he became vice president of the new National Assembly...
...leadership after the 1830 rising against Charles X. But Lafayette dithered in restoring order. The Due d'Orléans emerged to become King Louis-Philippe and forced Lafayette to resign as commander of the National Guard. "The sad truth was, no one really disliked Lafayette," says Bernier, "but no one wanted him back." He managed to stay in the spotlight, however, speaking out forcefully for such causes as free public education, independence movements in Greece and Poland and the perfection of French democracy. He died in 1834 at 76, surrounded by his family and pressing a medallion...