Word: gallicisms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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However, Giraudoux fails to maintain a balance between ideas and spicy French sex, and the play becomes bikini. Interspersed with rationalistic salvos are a crescendo of kisses, lovers entwined like vine leaves on a Greek frieze and racy gods until the romp is reduced to a gala Gallic gaiety and the comedy verges on hedonism. Frankly, three hours of the bed become boring...
...English translation used is adequate on the whole. One minor quibble, however: since the aim is to capture as Gallic a spirit as possible, why do they doggedly insist on talking of guineas, pounds, shillings and pence instead of louis d'or, livres, sols, deniers, pistoles and francs...
France is the Sick Woman of Europe. Diagnoses of her ailments are plentiful, with blame falling on practically anything, including the parliamentary system, the Gallic spirit, absinthe, existentialism, contraceptives, conservatism, radicalism, modern art, the unreasonable insistence on reason, the undigested principles of the French Revolution. Brilliant Satirist Jean Dutourd (A Dog's Head, The Best Butter) will have little to do with any of these explanations. He refuses to see history in terms of abstract ideas, cycles or forces. He sees it in terms of men-weak or strong, good or bad. wise or stupid, to be judged...
...character with the sort of inane intensity a small boy devotes to a wart. Items: French Suspiciousness, British Weather. The Cult of the Liver among Middle-Aged Frenchmen, The Function of the Horse in Anglo-Saxon Courtship Patterns. There is a marvelous visual essay on the ricochet principle in Gallic traffic, and the now-familiar comic scene in which a British mother gives her daughter some moral aspirin on her wedding night: "I know, my dear, it's disgusting. But . . . just close your eyes and think of England...
...girls are a study of Gallic contrasts. Mick Micheyl is sunny; Juliette Greco is subterranean. In her simple sheath or plain skirt and white broadcloth shirtwaist, Mick affects the saucy style of a French street urchin-the impertinent type Parisians call un titi. Juliette, in her clinging, floor-length black, displays the kind of world-weariness that once moved Jean Cocteau to speak of "the 'ruinous jewel of her heart." Both Mick and Juliette, intense admirers insist, do not merely sing-they have something...