Word: frenchmens
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Lover's Doubt. The land of Voltaire and Descartes, France has been equally hospitable to Nostradamus and Cagliostro. Ordinarily tightfisted Frenchmen pay more than a billion dollars annually-more than France spends on scientific research-to an odd-lot collection of soothsayers, seers, fortunetellers, clairvoyants, gypsies, faith healers and prophets. In Paris alone, there is one charlatan for every 120 Parisians, compared with one doctor for every 514 citizens and one priest for every...
Curious as to what sort of following charlatans have, the newspaper France-Soir sponsored a public-opinion poll that suggested that 58% of all Frenchmen could say under what sign of the zodiac they had been born, 53% regularly read their daily horoscopes in the press, 43% thought of astrologers as scientists, 38% intended to have their horoscopes drawn up by an astrologer, and 37% believed that character traits correspond to zodiacal signs. More to France's credit was the fact that the most avid believers turned out to be farmers, people over 65 and workers earning less than...
...Louis XIII was an age yearning for gentility. Interiors with paneled walls, beetle-browed fireplace mantels and massively beamed ceilings still lacked the airiness of the Sun King's era. But historians call the earlier Louis' reign the "High Epoch," a period when Frenchmen culled ideas from the cultures of other European countries and refined them with their own innate good taste. Navigation had proved the world rounder and more compact than even Columbus thought. Rembrandt was mastering the play of light and shade, or chiaroscuro, as the baluster lathework of Louis XIII furniture tried to imitate. Louis...
...head of the Resistance movement. He was small, dark and inconspicuous, usually wore a navy blue trenchcoat and a grey scarf to hide the scars that remained on his neck from his suicide attempt. Moving about the country with speed and stealth, Moulin managed to weld together mutually mistrustful Frenchmen of the left, right and center. He created a clandestine press, arranged the sabotage and harassment of Nazi detachments, and drew up plans for massive help for the eventual Allied landings. While the Nazis searched frantically for him, Moulin, nicknamed "the King of Shadows," held a Paris meeting...
...terribly paid for." Dramatically addressing the dead Moulin, Malraux cried: "You, leader of the martyred Resistance fighters who died in cellars, look with your empty eye sockets at all the women in black who now keep watch over our companions!" Malraux closed with an appeal to the 16 million Frenchmen who have been born since Moulin's murder: "Think of him, youth of France, as you would hold out your hands to his poor deformed face on that last day, to his lips that did not speak. On that day, his face was the face of France...