Word: breton
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...marketplace of Locronan, a tiny (pop. 1,000) village in Brittany, 5,000 Frenchmen got set for a hike. Most were Bretons or of Breton origin, and many had come from far-off towns and lands; all had waited six years for the day. The occasion: the Tromenie, Brittany's sexennial pilgrimage, whose history, like Locronan's, dates back to the 5th or 6th century...
...hopelessly unjust in attributing the name America to Italian Mapmaker and Merchant Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1512). The eponym in truth: a fine English lad named Richard Amerycke. In the Bristol view of history, Amerycke, a customs collector, saw to it that Italian Explorer John Cabot, who discovered Cape Breton Island in 1497 and claimed it for the British crown, received a pension from King Henry VII. A grateful Cabot then named the conquest for his benefactor. Said the Lord Mayor, straight-faced: ''Everyone in Bristol has always known...
...Unknown Named Van Gogh. Bernard's role was never fully appreciated until Art Historian John Rewald told the story last autumn in his authoritative Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to Gauguin. In the late 1880s Gauguin was painting in the Breton village of Pont-Aven along impressionist lines. Bernard was a precocious, rebellious, perceptive intellectual. He used to go on painting jaunts outside Paris with another unknown named Vincent van Gogh, who thought well of Bernard's work. Van Gogh urged Bernard to see Gauguin, who had once rebuffed him, and the young painter went to Pont-Aven...
Canoeing to China. Ever since the Breton sea captain, Jacques Cartier, discovered it in 1535, the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes route has been North America's most important waterway. Cartier thought he had found a new route to China; he and later French explorers pressed on upriver expecting to find Oriental gold and spices. They never reached China, but the voyageurs, fur traders and missionaries who came after them canoed up the river and its tributaries into lands that were to prove far richer than fabled Cathay. The river led them to the Mississippi Valley, the Great Plains...
...left or have been 'excluded.' (To name a few: Picabia, Magritte, Giacommeti, Brauner, Tanguy, the artists, and Crevel, Desnes, and Eluard, the poets.) For me, surrealism will continue to be represented by poets such as these, rather than by the mediocrities clinging to the masthead of Andre Breton. No wonder he is lonely! I am sorry...