Word: devilment
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...affection. Raymond Radiguet was 14 when he began his conquest of literary Paris. Cocteau sponsored him, fell in love with him and, as he never tired of boasting, locked him up in a room to make him relinquish alcohol in favor of ink. The result was the minor classic Devil in the Flesh. But shortly after the book's triumphant publication in 1920, Radiguet died of typhoid...
...Equal pay for equal work? Fight like the devil for it. Burn your bras (if you don't sag). But, please, don't deny your femininity; it is a part of your significance as a human being (it is not nearly all of your worth, although some of my sex seem to think it is). And, I beg of you, do not throw your children into day-care centers; she (he) needs you. Rearing a child is no menial task, but is too momentous to be subordinated and too important to fail. Its importance and difficulty should...
...solitary for two years, he performs a prison miracle: surviving without going mad. His pals smuggle extra food to him. He methodically exercises his memory while pacing his cell up to eleven hours a day to keep in shape. Finally, in 1941, Papillon escapes definitively, floating away from Devil's Island on a pair of tide-driven bags stuffed with coconuts to serve as food and floatation. End Part I, nearly all of Papillon's story covered in this book...
...more famous, but he may not be read so avidly as he was in France. As a man he seems both hard to dislike or profoundly distrust. But his story often seems too good to be true, and raises the question of just how much Sunday supplemental escapee-from-Devil's Island experience he has incorporated as his own. For example, on one cavale (escape) he gets help from an island full of lepers, and when one hands him some coffee, a whole diseased finger comes off and sticks to the bowl...
...redeeming himself by acts of courage and charity-is a French epic hero. Alfred Dreyfus is his counterpart in the real world of politics and treason. Few American readers will feel Gallic tremors of empathy when Papillon sits on Dreyfus' very bench as he plots escape from Devil's Island, or when, in a Hugo-like episode, he risks his life trying to save a warden's tiny daughter fallen among sharks...