Word: caf
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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MEMOIRS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER, by Simone de Beauvoir. France's existentialist termagant. Jean Paul Sartre's first lady of the Left Bank cafés, is at least as candid as she is philosophically stubborn. Her memoirs of girlhood owe most of their charm to the surprising fact that her origins were Catholic, her upbringing puritan. She describes all this with considerable grace, ends with a conversion to Sartre's atheism which seems from her own testimony to be just another straitjacket, but one she can wear with arrogance...
...sunny August day more than 24 years ago, a young man of Cremona named Francesco Ghizzoni fell in love. The girl was a 16-year-old blonde with blue eyes, an infectious laugh, and a good figure. Francesco, who at 25 already owned a small café, a house and some land, made an instant decision: "This girl will be my wife...
...discovered that her name was Angela Mondini and that she too lived in Cremona, across the Po River from his café. Plunging wholeheartedly into the timeless rituals of Lombard courtship, Francesco promenaded beneath her window, cultivated her friends and relatives, encountered her "by chance" when she went strolling. Angela played her part by being good, like a signorina should. When they met, she would say politely, "Buon-giorno, Signor Ghizzoni" and coolly ignore his urgings to "call me Francesco." He asked for a date, and Angela refused. He sent her gifts. Angela returned them...
...years, Francesco appeared nightly under her window, plaintively calling her name. He spent daylight hours in a nearby café, waiting for a glimpse of her. He followed her to the movies and sat behind her. His friends became worried that desperate Francesco might do something foolish, and begged Angela to accept him. "I'll marry whom I like," she said...
...child's garden of verse. Juvenile satire nourishes it. What British children did to The Ballad of Davy Crockett in 1956 should make Walt Disney shudder. Not a vestige remained of the 17 official verses. New versions ranged from "Born on a table top in Joe's café,/ The dirtiest place in the U.S.A." to "Born on a rooftop in Battersea/ Joined the Teds when he was only three...