Word: frenchness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...strain that runs from Voltaire to Sartre-remained just below the surface. In 1945, when De Gaulle set up his postwar government, he, though himself a devout Catholic communicant, curtly withdrew the wartime subsidies that Vichy had set aside for Church-run schools. But still, one in five French children attended the church schools, though the buildings were often in miserable shape, and learning, except for the top Jesuit schools, suffered from ill-paid and inferior teaching. The question of state aid to Catholic schools has passionately dogged every French government since, including De Gaulle's Fifth Republic. Last...
Singer Edith Piaf's tour of the French provinces was a disaster from the start. In Maubeuge. she lost her way among the lyrics of her songs and collapsed sobbing against the piano. At Le Mans, rumors spread that she had to be taken home in an ambulance. By the time she reached Dreux she was in a limbo between sleeping and waking-taking tranquilizers and sleeping pills for some semblance of rest, taking stimulants to shock her back into the raucous nightclub world that was her life. Her manager begged her not to go on; her musicians refused...
...Piaf, 44, went on. And because she was Piaf, French newspapers followed her through every symptom. They had long since told the chronicle of her sorrows: the childhood blindness, the unhappy love affairs, the near-fatal auto accidents. They had recorded her illness in Paris in 1954, the collapse in Stockholm in 1958, last year's major surgery (for a gastric ulcer) in New York. Now the headline writers seemed engaged in a macabre watch. "Piaf suffers and refuses to capitulate," cried Paris-Journal. "Piaf falling like Moliere on the planks of the provincial coliseum*-that was worth...
...February 1673, the great French dramatist Jean Baptiste Poquelin, whose nom de plume was Moliere, ignored his failing health and insisted on acting in Le Malade Imaginaire, the last play he ever wrote. Unlike the hero of his comedy, Moliere, 51, was suffering from no imaginary illness. He had a convulsion on the stage of Paris' Palais Royal Theater, was carried home, where he died after a violent fit of coughing...
Born. To Suzy Parker, 26, top U.S. fashion model, now a budding cinemactress (The Best of Everything), and Pierre de la Salle, 31, French playboy and sometime writer: their first child, a daughter; in Paris. Name: Georgia. Weight...