Word: bistro
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...Japanese. In his character were the seeds of present-day Japan. A story is told that one day in his youth in Paris he was drinking in a bistro. Spirits ran high. Accidentally he broke a window. A French waiter grew angry and told him to pay up. Kimmochi Saionji, gentleman of Japan, broke several more windows in the place, paid for them all. Then he haughtily commanded the waiter to wrap up the pieces of glass in a package, took the package under his arm and stalked out, head high...
...1920s was a newspaperman's alcoholic dream. The pay was not much ($40 a week was top) and the turnover was fast, but the work was easy and two big staffs (afternoon and night) of rewrite and copydesk men could spend half their time in the bistro on the corner or playing cards on the copy desk. The Herald was published in an old building in the Rue du Louvre, adequately covered by insurance, and it was considered all right to light fires in the wastebaskets and put them out with imitation champagne. Only permanent fixtures on the staff...
...asked to all the best houses-once"; "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing"); or fighting in court, desperate and cornered, for his freedom; or sinking out of life, bloated and weary, in the tarnished exile of a Paris bistro...
...week's biggest winner. Louis Ribiere. 32, a small coal-&-wood merchant of Avignon. At dawn he was irritably reaching for his breakfast coffee in an Avignon bistro when the barman pushed him a copy of the morning paper. Ribiere's eye fell on the news that his ticket had won the 5,000,000 franc ($323,000) Grand Prize. He whirled, leaped into the air, vanished out the door, homeward bound to check his ticket number. It checked. He ran back through Avignon's narrow streets to the building where his mother is a janitress. Yipping...
...detail. Drawing in a mixture of pencil, pastel and oil paint he builds an effective, hilarious whole by concentrating on a few minutiae: the wrinkles in Secretary Stimson's coats, the gaunt wrists of a Park Avenue doorman, the wild hair and felt slippers of a French bistro waiter...