Word: childing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Possessed," but cool, handsome Jacques and his pale paramour looked anything but demonic as they sat, clad in black, listening impassively to the charges. The daughter of a poor postman, orphaned at 13 and self-educated, Denise had been a capable, serious-minded government secretary. Jacques, an illegitimate child whose parents had married only as an afterthought, was a graduate of Saint-Cyr, an artillery lieutenant and a dedicated student of philosophy...
...heady, dark brews of French intellectualism, from the Marquis de Sade to Jean Paul Sartre. Denise was the ardent disciple of them all, a girl so enamored of the intellectual life and so prone to bedding with students that she soon found herself the mother of a bastard child. Her lover Jacques had already fathered two bastards by the time they met, and his approach to women was always patterned on that of his intellectual idols. "In the manner of Gide," he would tell a susceptible girl, "I offer you fervor...
...action. It was all very well, he suggested, for Denise to say she loved him, but what about the proof? "To merit my love," said young Jacques, "you must go from suffering to suffering." He cited a passage in D'Annunzio in which a jealous husband kills the child his wife has had by another man, and asked, "Now, isn't that beautiful?" Denise agreed, "but," she said, "I haven't the right to do such a thing." "Exactly," said her lover, "that's the whole point...
...Bernanos. Thus convinced, Denise did her best to please. Once she tried to drop her pretty little 2½-year-old daughter out of a window. A peering neighbor spoiled the fun, and Denise hastily pulled in the child, who laughed at mummy's new game. Jacques was furious; so a week later Denise threw the child into a canal...
Author Hersey, born in Tientsin in 1914, raised in China for the first ten years of his life, conjures up the flowering mists, brooding mountain masses and gorge-shadowed surfaces of the Yangtze as if from a child's vivid book of memories. Equally vivid and enlightening is the image of two cultures once fingertip close in friendship, destined by later history to draw back and ball their fists in sad and bitter enmity...