Word: franco-prussian
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Born in Marseille, Monticelli spent his middle years in Paris. When the.Germans invaded France in the Franco-Prussian War, he decided to go home again. He walked, stopping off at likely farmhouses and portraying the farmers' daughters to earn his keep. The journey took eight pleasant months. In Marseille he settled down to steady work in a red-shuttered studio and to a genial evening round of opera and absinthe. It is said that when admirers flocked about his cafe table to praise his work, the bald, bearded old Bohemian would blithely reply: "I don't know what...
...petticoat-a device that was considered highly original when it cropped up again during World War I.) Characteristically, however, it was Prussia that introduced Europe to mass espionage. Wilhelm Stieber, spymaster to Bismarck, boasted that he had some 40,000 agents in France at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Stieber was almost surely exaggerating, but his vacuum-cleaner espionage technique did supply the Prussian army not only with military information but with accurate estimates of the finances of leading citizens in occupied French towns...
...probably take time: after all, Monsieur Ducreux was a member of the executive committee of Herriot's own Radical Socialist Party. Herriot started off in style: he limned the pastoral beauties of the Vosges countryside where Ducreux came from, and recalled its people's heroism during the Franco-Prussian War. But then, after effusive condolences to the deputy's family, he unexpectedly finished. The house sat down with murmurs of relief; the eulogy had been mercifully short...
...latest list of collectors' items from the rare book department of Charles Scribner's Sons in Manhattan included a copy of the declaration which launched the Franco-Prussian War, signed by Kaiser Wilhelm, and priced at $2,750. It was a gift from Rudolph Hess to his good friend Adolf Hitler and inscribed in gold: "To the Führer, Christmas, 1938, in which year he twice overran borders in order to bring back German territory into the Reich." Among half a dozen other books from the Führer's personal library: autographed first editions...
GERMANY Out of the Desert Lili Marlene's oldest friends had a get-together last week.* Into the hilly Westphalian town of Iserlohn, through the city gate topped by a huge iron cross memorializing the Franco-Prussian War, trooped 2,500 Germans. They eagerly searched each other's faces, occasionally stopping to shake hands amid exclamations like: "Aren't you Schmidt of the 15th?", "Wasn't I with you at El Alamein?" It was the first reunion of Germany's famed Afrika Korps. At ceremonies in the town cemetery they paid sober honor to their...