Word: dijon
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Songs & Toasts. Charles de Gaulle has called him "the clown in a cassock." But mustard-making Dijon loves him. The city has happily elected him mayor and Deputy to Parliament for 18 years. Last week, on his 88th birthday, his desk was piled high with congratulatory messages. The band of the local infantry regiment turned up at town hall to serenade him with Burgundian drinking songs, and everyone joined in a toast-a kir, of course...
...began his career as a country curate, but was drafted by the Bishop of Dijon for a team of priestly commandos who specialized in street-corner evangelism. He learned to give free-thinking hecklers tit for tat. "You talk a lot about God, but we've never seen him," one yelled at him. "Prove to us he exists." Answered the canon: "You've never seen my derriere, have you? Nevertheless, it exists...
Only with Generals. Kir more or less appointed himself mayor of Dijon in June 1940 after the town's officials fled before the advancing German armies. When a German colonel burst through the door and extended his hand, Kir spurned it. "Excuse me," he said, "but I only shake hands with generals." For a few months the Germans kept Kir on as town overseer-until they discovered that he had put municipal employees to work forging false identity cards for escaped prisoners of war. He was convicted on charges of aiding the Resistance, spent 57 days in a death...
After the war, Kir was overwhelmingly elected mayor as a moderate conservative. Dijon's anticlericals admit that he has scrupulously shunned favoring the interests of his church. Kir's antics infuriate some other priests and conservative Catholic laymen, but his discreetly tolerant bishop refers to him as "a very worthy priest...
Caloric Cuisine. Kir has enthusiastically "twinned" Dijon in friendship with 18 foreign cities, from Stalingrad to Kankan in Guinea to Dallas. And Kir sticks by his friends; he stoutly resisted a proposal, after the Kennedy assassination, to change the name of Dijon's Rue Dallas...