Word: franc
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...messages and orders of the second day. His only propitiatory gesture to the gods of war and luck had been a judicious rubbing of his seven pocket pieces-a collection of old coins which includes a cartwheel silver dollar, a British five-guinea piece and a French franc...
Despite its homely familiarity, when money goes abroad it cloaks itself in mystery. The present generation has seen this mystery in its darkest phase. It has seen the franc bloat and the mark blow up. It has seen Montagu Norman claw his way up from devaluation to set the pound on gold at the sacred rate of $4.86½. It has seen Hjalmar Schacht counter with moneys designed to fit every purse and purpose. It has listened to the jargon of scores of theories. And it has rightly suspected that all this confusion had much to do with unemployment...
...become eminently practical in wartime. A chaplain who recently went through the pockets of ten Americans killed in battle said the dominant thing he found was toilet paper. Careless soldiers who were caught without such preparedness have to use 20-franc notes...
While the Germans counterattacked along the rest of the line all last week, U.S. troops pounded their enemy in the cruel hills, marking their forward motion in yards. Then, suddenly and overnight, the enemy collapsed and the Americans lunged forward twelve miles to Mateur. The Corps Franc d'Afrique, to the north of the Americans, pressed forward on the coast to within 15 miles of Bizerte...
Others insist that in his later life he copied his own pictures to make enough money for his charities to fellow painters (Corot once refused 10,000 francs for some pictures, asked the buyer to give Millet's widow a ten-year 1,000-franc annuity instead). But as Bachelor Corot grew older, his pictures grew more effeminate, his landscapes became more wishy-washy, more virginal. Famed Critic Julius Meier-Graefe once summed up what was wrong with Corot as a painter by remarking that he "lacked the grain of poison which is the preservative of greatness...