Word: buffons
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...only part of Chulkaturin's appeal is to be found in the script. For the rest Huston is responsible. He makes Chulkaturin awkward without making him an embarrassing buffon, the greatest danger in such a characterization. For if Chulkaturin were a clown, his words, his perception, his ability to endure the "slings and arrows" could not possibly be convincing. When Huston smiles, it is the quiet smile, the wise and tolerant smile, that can appear only on the lips of the man who has known a bitter fate and has, ultimately, perceived the irony of it. He knows, quite well...
...Young U.S. Living in the times of the French Enlightenment, Houdon became one of the first sculptors to live independent of noble patronage. He did the great intellects: Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, D'Alembert, Buffon. Commissions then brought him to the young U.S. to sculpt Washington in his stolid soldierliness, Franklin in his honest wisdom, Jefferson in his aristocratic brilliance...
Among other scientific acquisitions are: the first printed work on perfumes; an early study in anthropology, printed in 1642; mathematician John Taylor's "Thesaurarium Mathematicae," written in 1642; and a 20th century edition of the texts of the early French naturalist, Buffon, with drawings by Pablo Picasso...
...Alembert wrote on mathematics, Turgot on economics, Quesnay on agriculture, Buffon on nature, Rousseau on music, and Montesquieu on taste. Diderot himself wrote on everything from intolerance and Spinoza to anagrams and onomancy-the "science" of telling a man's fortune by the letters in his name. He treated topics that intellectuals had been apt to ignore before. He spent hours studying iron foundries and gunpowder mills at first hand, imported workers from the factories of Lyons to help him with an article on the velvet trade...
Picasso's Oriental Deer is delicate and fleet enough to outrun one of Buffon's best rhapsodies. His Grasshoppers-which, like Buffon, he conceives as armored leaping machines-are pictured with the immediacy of a farmer awakening from a nap in the field to find them right under his nose. The vital, trembling Horse looks exactly like what Buffon must have meant when he said horses were "the noblest conquest man has ever made...