Word: frans
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...François Rabelais warned his readers to be careful with Gargantua and Pantogruel. "Following the dog's example," he told them, "you will have to be wise in sniffing, smelling, and estimating these fine and meaty books; swiftness in the chase and boldness in the attack are what is called for; after which, by careful reading and frequent meditation, you should break the bone and suck the substantific marrow...
Forbidden Texts. François Rabelais was born in Touraine around 1495, the son of a country lawyer. He was placed, in early youth, as a novice in a Franciscan monastery, and later he was ordained a priest. A crack student, François soon got his hands on some forbidden Greek texts. Enraged, the good brothers snatched his books away. Outraged, François pulled strings and had himself transferred to the cultured Benedictines, who encouraged the study of Greek...
...long after, François impulsively doffed his Benedictine habit, and went absent without leave on a grand tour of the French universities. He became first a theologian, then a lawyer, then a doctor-in all, one of the most erudite men of his age. He was almost 40 when he began writing his tales of Gargantua and Pantagruel, partly for love of writing, but partly for need of money...
...Died. François Fratellini, 72, worldfamed clown of Paris' Medrano arena, leaving his brother Albert as the only survivor of the Three Fratellinis, who kept a generation of Europeans laughing, drew a 1949 boo from the U.S.S.R. ("reactionary . . . bourgeois . . . classical exponents of buffoon games"); of cancer; in Le Perreux, France...
France has its own Titoists. They are a group of "nationalist" Communists who, like Tito, are for Marxism but against the way Stalin & Co. boss the show in Marxism's name. The group, calling itself Mouvement Communiste Français, was founded a month ago in the northern coal fields by one Charles Lemoine, a stocky ex-coal miner. At a rally of 400 miners, he cried: "The Communist Party, yesterday our hope, has been unconditionally handed over to Moscow . . . For this party, the interests of the French people are subordinated to the interests of the Soviet Union...