Word: courtesans
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...business in official secrets on a grand scale. Maltreated Dutch wife of a bibulous Scottish captain in the Dutch colonial forces, she went on the stage in Paris in 1905, passing as part Javanese, with a performance of muscular bravura learned in Java. She became France's leading courtesan, sought, kept and highly feed by eminent members of the diplomatic set. French agents saw her in Berlin the day hostilities began, riding triumphantly with Chief of Police Jagow. (He had originally called on her to complain about her dancing naked in a Berlin night club, remained to engage...
...sensuous space, serenity and golden sublimation, visitors could look on Titian's Lady at the Mirror. Across the room Veronese's Venus at her Toilet turned her opulent, cool and massive back. A pig-eyed, swollen-bellied little courtesan appeared in Lucas Cranach's delicately painted Nymph Reposing. From the 17th Century came a dusky Landscape with Nymphs and Satyrs by France's great Nicolas Poussin. How nude painting became stage prettiness and erotic folderol in 18th-and early 19th-Century France was almost too amply demonstrated in pictures by Watteau, Boucher, Baudouin, Girodet and Prud...
...Dressed in my costume as the Venetian courtesan in The Tales of Hoffmann, I looked for all the world like one of Casanova's memoirs. . . . Thunderous applause and generous bravos (some of these, I suspect, for my extremely feminine thighs and legs, well shown off by smooth. skin-tight trunks in my third-act costume.... I knew that four of my beaus were in the audience. Each one had carefully let me know where he would be sitting. The impulse to play a little joke on them all was too much for me. As the opera went...
...early days of Christianity, Egypt was famed for her desert fathers, solitary saints who lived in caves or on pillars, made friends of lions, jackals, converts of such sinners as the beauteous courtesan Thais. Over Egypt's sands last week trudged 300 policemen, mobilized by the Government to deal with 100 merry desert monks wrongfully occupying a monastery because they felt their social life was being repressed...
...rulers, Queen Maria Carolina and King Ferdinand, Lord Hamilton and his courtesan-wife, the hero Nelson, and the nefarious Acton, privy councillor, are skillfully contrasted with the populace of Naples, aristocrats, shopkeepers, servants, and the appalling "Iazzarone", who lived like beasts in filthy holes by the sea, coming out only at night or when there was looting to be done. Vincent Sheean's first novel is excellent. Never, as the jacket-blurb says, actually anti-historical, it is an impressive demonstration of the mingling in just proportion of literal fact and educated imagination...