Word: cognac
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Every Wednesday night, a chubby French biologist named Jean Rostand* sips a glass of cognac in a railroad cafe at Ville-d'Avray and plunges bravely but vainly into a village chess tournament. The rest of his week is spent in lonelier fun: a lifelong love affair with a house full of frogs and toads...
Born the son of a French brandy maker in the little town of Cognac, he quit school at 16, in plenty of time to earn a million dollars by the time he was 40. During World War I he pooled French and British shipping; in the Depression he lost his first million, and in the '30s he became one of the world's most active and least-known financial backroom boys. Monnet's influence on events has often been decisive. It was Monnet's insistence that the Allies should place large aircraft orders...
...Reds to expedite the reforms that Rome badly needs-housing people who live in caves, purging municipal corruption, modernizing public services. "What has the Atlantic pact or what happens in Czechoslovakia to do with how Rome's local administration is run?" he asks, as he pours an interviewer cognac and coffee. Communists are old hands in dealing with men like Selvaggi...
...left her pregnant); a nymphomaniac stage star married him and later took an overdose of morphine after he divorced her. Glandular charm plus superficial talent took him to the top of the theatrical heap. But inside, he was a psychic bankrupt who needed several stiff slugs of cognac to get past the first act. When he dies on the last page, it seems only reasonable to conclude that his bartender will miss him most...
...months in a Rhodesian internment camp he was assigned to decorate the camp church's interior. He did the job in tempera, and claims that he completed a normal two years' work in four months, egged on by two Franciscan friars who kept him well fueled with cognac and whisky. (Pagliacci, a two-fisted drinker, says he does his best painting when slightly tiddly...