Word: devilment
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first time in a century, there were no prisoners last week in Cayenne Penal Colony, the equatorial prison long known as "Devil's Island." The last 58 beaten, broken convicts were transferred from the South American swamps to a Paris jail, and with that France brought to an end a prison more infamous than any crime it had ever punished. From the day it was founded in 1854, some 70,000 Frenchmen were sent out to its noisome stockades in expiation of crimes ranging from robbery to murder and high treason. Hardly more than 2,000 ever returned...
Reserved for political prisoners, the little island which gave the whole colony its name was actually only a small part of the sprawling penal community-two other rocky islands and two mainland settlements along the banks of French Guiana's Maroni River. But the name sticks: only the Devil himself could have designed such hellish discomfort for his prisoners as those that abounded in the steaming jungles of Guiana, or hired jailers as efficient as the shark-infested seas and fever-ridden swamps that stood guard on all sides of the Cayenne colony. The world got its first full...
...like his mistress, write for 14 hours at a stretch and then mount a horse and gallop to a lovers' tryst. Soon he was dropped by the wayside, and George moved on to Novelist Prosper Merimee. Merimee, as Maurois vouches, "was of the race from which the Devil picks his Don Juans," and spoke of love "with all the coarseness of a medical student"; George hoped that his cynicism would cure her "childish susceptibilities." But "Don Juan failed utterly to come up to scratch...
...liked always to have a hunchback friend nearby when he raced, for good luck. He always wore the same yellow sweater, blue pants and tricolored scarf. Italians said of Nuvolari, as they had long before said of their spellbinding violinist, Paganini. that he had "a pact with the devil." This belief was strongly supported by Nuvolari's chief European rival, Achille Varzi. In the 1930 Mille Miglia, Varzi was coasting along the homestretch at night, confident that he was far in the lead. For miles, he had noticed no headlights behind him. Suddenly, out of the blackness...
...Meanwhile, many movie-men were beginning to think that 3-D was less a shot in the arm than a bump on the head: box-office returns on the latest 3-D films are showing a steady decline from the top grosses of such early novelty hits as Bwana Devil and The House of Wax. Because many theater owners believe the profit on 3-D pictures is not yet enough to pay off the added cost of enlarged projection booths, extra machines and extra operators, only 2,100 of the nation's 21,500 theaters are equipped to show...