Word: courtesans
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...aging, bedridden Signora had been shrewd enough to quit her life as a ruthless courtesan before she became the victim instead of the victimizer of men. Now her cook, spying from the window on what happened in the Via del Corno, kept her supplied with the essential information for her intrigues and extortions. In the end, deserted and foiled, the half-crazed Signora determined to punish the entire street; she bought up every house and ordered wholesale evictions. But her fury brought on a stroke that left her a speechless idiot, while the Fascists collected the rent on her houses...
...feigned passion, and strained for it, but could seldom find it. Later he was to admit that "I only know how to tell women I admire and love them when I feel neither one nor the other." Perhaps he remembered the letter he had written to a Creole courtesan, a friend of his great-uncle: "I should far rather make a slip with you than be on the right side even with the whole Academy-and [Anatole] France would, too. Indeed, it would be delightful to make a slip with you." His passion for the Creole never went beyond...
...last Constantine by his Moslem conquerors in 1453. Throughout those dark ages Byzantium had blazed, fitfully bright, as the half-classical, half-oriental capital of pagan and Christian art alike. Baltimore's entire exhibition would have been barely enough to ornament a single villa for a favorite courtesan of the 9th Century Emperor Theophilus. In a day when Rome was a vast ruin, and Paris and London mud-walled towns, Theophilus was tearing down palaces in Byzantium (which Constantine I had renamed Constantinople) simply for the fun of planning new and better ones'. Theophilus liked such playthings...
...left. But in the course of a lonely ramble he is enticed into the "magic theater" of postwar German gaiety-a fantasy of despairing brilliance in vices and anodynes. Here he finds that self-knowledge is the knowledge of multiple selves. Though he falls in love with a courtesan, thinking himself happy, his disintegration proceeds. The end of his madness is not suicide but murder...
...sheer voluptuousness, the book's heroine, honey-haired Courtesan Amber St. Clare makes Scarlett O'Hara look like a schoolmarm-a fact that could scarcely escape Hollywood's attention any more than Macmillan's. On the plausible assumption that Forever Amber might be its biggest smash hit since Gone With the Wind, the shrewd house of Macmillan spent a small fortune ($20,000) on advance publicity, and were set to saturate the nation's bookshops with 225,000 advance copies. It was a good bet that before the month was out Amber would be boiling...