Word: epton
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Nina Epton-World...
...deny that they are consummate kiss-and-tell artists. Over the centuries, they have told all in diaries, letters, memoirs, novels and the social chronicles of boudoir, salon and brothel. With one eye on the lofty mystery of love and the other hovering at the keyhole, British Author Nina Epton scans the Gallic love parade in an amusing though helter-skelter review...
Romantic love did not always exist, says Author Epton. It was invented by the troubadours, the hobohemian minstrel poets of the late Middle Ages. Medieval ladies spent half their time racing across the jousting fields with buckets of hot water, bathing and bandaging strange men. It remained for the troubadours to glamorize the knight-lady relationship and raise it to the level of a semimystical romantic cult. For all their platonic, fig-leafy sentiments, the troubadours themselves were a crudely carnal lot, and they gave romance in France a lasting split personality: love and marriage became contradictory terms...
Came the Revolution. George Sand's grandmother once told her that "the Revolution brought old age into the world." Certainly, the tumbrils seemed to cart off some of the zest of Author Epton's chronicle. Napoleon, the self-made emperor, bolted his love affairs the way he bolted his meals. Lovers, who had been pretty vigorous since the Renaissance, again began to talk about dying. A book on How to Succeed in Love, published in 1830, suggested fainting fits, attacks of hysteria, and suicide threats. Morbid romanticism subsequently gave way to liaisons based on credit ratings. Toward...