Word: coeur
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Author Nixon has done a superb job, gives life to her whole cast of characters, and appraises their actions with a strong sense of history. Even in her sober telling, the Calas case sounds like a cri de coeur. Popular history has too often dismissed Voltaire as an acerbic and with drawn pessimist. But in l'affaire Calas, he was supremely heroic in a dark and dangerous time, and Mrs. Nixon sees to it that his memory is well served...
Generally Parisians approve of sending the city to the cleaners. But one landmark raises doubts: Notre-Dame Cathedral, waiting defiantly in all its historic and original grime. Says venerable Municipal Councilor Armand Massard: "It would be better to blacken Sacré-Coeur. that ugly cream cheese." Middle-of-the-rue opinion advocates a rinsing that will not render Notre-Dame stark white but merely wash behind the gargoyles' ears...
...culture," trenchantly elucidates the principle of "negative cheerfulness" ("One statistician not long ago tried to cheer us all with his estimate that only 18 million people, not 50 million, would be killed here in a nuclear war"). He bristles with useless information ("Curmudgeon seems to derive from the French coeur mé-chant") and daffy definitions. At one point he supplies a graceful homemade nursery rhyme...
Within hours, the Corsican and North African hoods who control Parisian prostitution and crime began oiling their revolvers as they eyed the tempting spoils. Lodged high on the shoulder of Montmartre, just below the soaring domes of the Cathédrale du Sacré-Coeur, the Place Pigalle by day is a dreary, working-class square crowded with Algerians. At night, the square and the nearby alleys blossom into neon brilliance, offer to any passer-by probably the tawdriest and most expansive display of nude female flesh the world has seen since the passing of the Babylonian slave market. Prostitutes...
Winter always clamps an austere hand on the little mining town of Kellogg, Idaho (pop. 5,000), where most homes are heated by wood stoves. The encircling, mile-high mountains of the Coeur d'Alene mining area, rich in lead, zinc and silver, curtain off the sunlight except for a few midday hours. This year the 5,000 people of Kellogg await winter's arrival with a new dread: life in a town with its only industry shut down...