Word: gabelou
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...however, a delight to visit. One could write a little dictionary of received ideas about this engaging "primitive." It would begin with his nickname, the Douanier. (He was not, as MOMA's excellent catalog stresses, a customs inspector, but a much lowlier form of bureaucratic life, a gabelou, or toll collector.) The dictionary would go through a whole list of legendary things that Rousseau did not do or see or say, things he cooked up himself (such as the innocent fiction that he had been to Mexico in the army of Napoleon III and had seen real jungles) or that...
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