Word: fran
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Rabat bedroom of André Dubois, France's tall, elegant Ambassador to Morocco. When Dubois picked up the receiver a Frenchman serving with the Moroccan police excitedly reported that the newly independent Moroccan government was rounding up more than 50 members and alleged sympathizers of Présence Française, the organization of diehard colons who cannot reconcile themselves to Moroccan independence. A week earlier Moroccan police had discovered that Présence Française was circulating leaflets which urged Morocco's Berber minority to rebel against "Arab domination" and "the Arab Sultan." No one seriously...
Within minutes after he got the news. Ambassador Dubois was on the phone to Moroccan Premier Si Bekkai, delivering an angry protest. Dubois was not overly disturbed by the decision to deport the troublemaking colons. (One of the deportees, a former Présence Française president named Georges Causse, had been expelled from Morocco once before, by the French themselves, allowed to return by clemency of the Sultan.) The ambassador was, however, incensed at Si Bekkai's failure to live up to an agreement that the French embassy would be consulted on all matters involving French citizens...
...night, French Novelist Franchise (Bonjour Tristesse) Sagan was enjoying the gift of independence she recently offered herself on her 21st birthday: a new dark blue, green and white apartment on the Left Bank, in place of the bourgeois restrictions of her sedate family home. On warm days when Françoise is not dashing about in her Studebaker, Buick, Jaguar (bought with her first royalty check) or Gordini racer ("It is nice to touch it with your hand"), she can cool off with the gift of an American admirer: an electric hand fan decorated with diamonds and mink...
...favorite pose of the very young is to abandon hope because they still have so much. One of the best-paid literary practitioners of this kind of premature despair is Paris' intellectual gamin, Françoise Sagan, just turned 21. As readers who pushed the sales of Bonjour Tristesse past the million mark know, Sagan wears her world-weary rue with a spicy difference. In her novels, sin triumphs over everything but syntax. This high-styled amorality led one French critic to sum up her work as "classicism in panties...
...rueful summing up: "Well, what did it matter? I was a woman who had loved a man. It was a simple story." Being sad and wise and a little tired of it all in this continental way has a certain wayward charm. It seems to appeal so strongly to Françoise Sagan that she may never get around to striking any other pose...