Word: curtiss
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sweet to me," he exclaimed. "Now you'll go to bed with me. Look what a lovely bed it is ... I thought I was impotent. I have been for months. But you have roused me, you marvelous amazon. Let me kiss your lips." Curtiss put quest before scruple: "After all, I figured, the letters are unique and there are plenty of women who must like this kind of approach or he wouldn't have continued using it." In fact, the chore was less onerous than she had feared. "I must hand it to the Rumanians," she confided...
...Mina Curtiss...
...most of her life, writes Mina Curtiss, she had an incurable obsession: she could not resist reading other people's mail. When she was a child, Mina was caught going through her mother's love letters in the attic. Shortly after she returned from her honeymoon, she read her husband's letters from his first wife. "I was convinced," she explains, "that the clue to the secret of life, the creative process, lay in personal letters intended for somebody else." Finally, in middle age, she turned her disreputable habit to professional use. In 1947 the sneak reader...
Traveling to Europe two years after World War II was an adventure itself. Food was scarce, few rooms were heated, and even electricity was rationed. But Curtiss, who comes from a rich Boston family-her brother is Lincoln Kirstein, a founder and patron of the New York City Ballet-had all the advantages of money and connections. Establishing herself in the Paris Ritz, she made it her job to befriend Proust's friends and to beg or borrow those precious letters...
...more unselfish helper was Celeste Albaret, Proust's companion and housekeeper from 1913 until his death in 1922. In her late 50s, when Curtiss met her, Celeste and her husband, Odilon, who had been Proust's chauffeur, were running a dreary, working-class hotel on the Left Bank. Mme. Albaret's memory was a library in itself; she seemed to have cross-filed and indexed everything Proust had done or said. At one point, she told Curtiss, the master had been thrilled by a letter from a "M. Henri Jammes." Jammes -Henry James-had written that...