Word: chamond
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1952-1952
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
More surprising was the reaction in the country. From the ornate rostrum of the Chamber, beneath the stone-eyed gaze of Attic beauties, the prosaic tannery-man from St. Chamond ticked off the things he proposed to do: fight inflation, which had shrunk the franc to one twenty-fifth of its prewar value. Bring down prices, not by dirigisme (the Frenchman's word for government controls) but by persuading the big industrialists and the countless Antoine Pinays of France to be content with more reasonable profit margins. Balance the budget, not by his predecessors' resort to higher taxes...
...preferred to stay in his unpretentious five-room apartment, to save himself the rigors of the moving-out day which comes to all who move into the Matignon. As was his habit when a Deputy, he locked up his desk almost every weekend and took off to St. Chamond, to look in on his tannery and, as plain His Honor the Mayor, chat with his townspeople...
...watched as a shopkeeper cut a Camembert cheese in half and then priced each half differently. "Always-you hear me, always," Pinay reported indignantly, "the women asked for the more expensive piece." The story is told that Pinay, unable one weekend to get his customary haircut at St. Chamond, went to a Paris barber, and was shocked when he was charged twice what he usually paid back home. Now there is a price ceiling on haircuts. He eased the mistrust of France's cautious peasants by combining a general amnesty for past income-tax evasions with a novel bond...
Message on the Train. Ever the provincial, he orders his clothes not in Paris, but from "the best tailor in Lyon"; in his occasional travels he chooses not the first-but the second-class hotel. When cabinets fell, he always got on a train for St. Chamond instead of staying in Paris with the perennial hopefuls who clustered around the President's palace in the hope that, by chance or default, they might be tapped to form a government. He was a second-echelon minister-Economic Affairs-in the Queuille cabinet; in four successive cabinets he was Minister...
When the Faure cabinet fell last February, Pinay trotted off as usual to the Gare de Lyon. He was on the way back from St. Chamond a few days later when a messenger clambered into his compartment at Dijon with President Auriol's invitation to take a fling at forming a government. He had the brashness...