Word: frenchmen
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...Deterrent. Ever since 1925, when a reporter visited Guiana and wrote a blistering exposé of the prison colony for his paper, Le Petit Parisien, enlightened Frenchmen have been clucking over the shameful institution they call "the dry guillotine," but little was done about it. It took more than ten years before the French government finally admitted that Cayenne "does not appear to have any deterrent effect upon the criminals" and was "not good for the prestige of France in [the American] continent." In 1938 the government announced its intention to let the penal colony "disappear by extinction." Red tape...
...Island." The last 58 beaten, broken convicts were transferred from the South American swamps to a Paris jail, and with that France brought to an end a prison more infamous than any crime it had ever punished. From the day it was founded in 1854, some 70,000 Frenchmen were sent out to its noisome stockades in expiation of crimes ranging from robbery to murder and high treason. Hardly more than 2,000 ever returned...
...pilots nose into a swamp on take-off and are killed. Chamberlin damages his Bellanca in a routine test flight. Commander Richard E. Byrd, with his Fokker and four-man crew all set, waits at Roosevelt Field for the word from the weatherman. On May loth, two days after Frenchmen Nungesser and Coli take off from Paris, Lindbergh hops from San Diego to St. Louis in the record time of 14 hrs. 25 min., takes off next morning, and by afternoon is in New York...
...Star Republic's flag still flying outside public schools alongside the Stars & Stripes, the French embassy still standing at the old Lone Star capital of Austin. They were even more startled by some of the tall tales Texans told until they realized that it was just gasconnade (as Frenchmen call the braggadocio of their own "Texans" of Gascony). In Crystal City, Texas, the world's self-styled spinach capital, the Gossets found a statue of Popeye in the public square...
...Frenchmen who still pictured the South as a Scarlett O'Hara land of cotton plantations and Negro mammies were put wise: "To tell the truth, we did not see much cotton in the South. What we saw was oil, natural gas, helium, steel, magnesium, atomic energy and chemical plants." The Gossets were impressed with the advance of Negro education; they called all-Negro Howard University (in Washington, D.C.) "more modern than the average European university." To the French reporters, the Vieux Carre of French New Orleans was a fake-with its "pretentious airs of romanticism," its "tourist traps...