Word: cognac
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...Caviar & Cognac. Despite his $1,000,000-plus earnings, Author Gunther is perennially strapped. He was forced to interrupt work on Inside Africa to pick up much-needed fees from a lecture tour. Last fall he was so short that he did something he had always staunchly refused to do: an Inside blurb for an advertiser. Hired by a pharmaceutical manufacturer, he ground out a 5,000-word piece called Inside Pfizer ("Before I visited Pfizer, I did not know the difference between an antibiotic and a housefly"). Typically, Gunther earned his fee (more than $12,500) by traveling...
...height of his fame, poor Jonas poses for a portrait of the artist at work, but he himself no longer has the time or spirit to paint. Cognac consoles him with the illusion of creativity, and girls with the illusion of vitality. After that, Jonas' decline is swift, sure and touching. Dying, he scribbles one word on a blank canvas, but no one can be sure "whether it should be read solitary or solidary" (i.e., at one with society). Moral: wooing the Muse is not half so important, or difficult, as staying married...
Irma and Colette go together like cognac and coffee. Colette, too, ran the streets of Montmartre when she was a child. She worked, with no success, in a succession of sleazy cafes in Casablanca, Oran and Algiers ("I don't like to sing against the sound of popping champagne corks"). After a spell as a secretary (in a music publishing house) and as a band vocalist, she moved, still virtually unknown, into the role of Irma...
...clerks hold out large blocks to satisfy any last-minute demand by Soviet VIPs. A foreigner can usually wangle a seat at the last moment, even if a nontitled Soviet citizen must be bumped just before takeoff. In flight, meals are heavy and ordinary, include Georgian wines, vodka and cognac. The piston planes are un-pressurized, and many of the TU-1O4 jets are pressurized to a cabin altitude of only 9,000 ft. (v. 5,000 ft. for U.S. planes), carry oxygen masks next to each seat for passengers who cannot stand the thin...
...born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and Utopias." Logician Aron should know that doubt in one thing issues from faith in another. In any case, his is an unpractical enterprise in the present state of the French mind-like sending Coke to Cognac. He leaves France with nothing more nourishing than a paradox: "Let us pray for the advent of the sceptics...