Word: gallicisms
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Marceau's art has an autumnal seriousness, his artistry bubbles with Gallic springtime vivacity. He mixes sweetness with strength. His head wobbles like a flower on a too-slender stalk, but his feet are sprung steel on points when he dances his soundless ballets. He is a theatrical master of total illusion. When he climbs an imaginary ladder, the rungs creak; when he leans against a nonexistent bar, the bar leans back with wooden stubbornness; when his outthrust palms slide feverishly along a make-believe wall, the air turns brick-solid...
...asparagus, peaches and strawberries flow from the Midi into Paris. Responsible for this profitable bounty is a new network of dams, canals and irrigation ditches running from Marseille westward almost to the Spanish border. Responsible for the irrigation network is a 59-year-old northern Frenchman with the incontestably Gallic name of Philippe Lamour...
...year-and will become costlier still. For its money, France next year will have an operational force of 50 short-range Mirage IV bombers, each carrying two relatively low-yield atom bombs. Snickering military experts point out that this will be equal to only one U.S. bomber wing. For Gallic egos, this does not matter. More important, it will no doubt increase France's influence. Already, its imminent reality has persuaded the U.S. to supply De Gaulle with air-to-air refueling tanker planes to increase the Mirages' effective range...
...chickens in Europe at prices below cost of production. In Bavaria and Westphalia, protectionist German farmers' associations stormed that U.S. chickens are artificially fattened with arsenic and should be banned. The French government did ban U.S. chickens, using the excuse that they are fattened with estrogen. With typical Gallic concern, Frenchmen hinted that such hormones could have catastrophic effects on male virility...
...concerns one Gabrielle Fenayrou, who, while never bloodying her pretty hands, was the muse for two murderers. Gabrielle lives with a gouty old husband and keeps a handsome young lover. One afternoon while tangoing (the year is 1913), he tells her he is betrothed to another-but, with true Gallic practicality, assures her that this need not interrupt their dalliance for a moment. Gabrielle, combining sang-froid with S. Freud, goes along with this, and together they plot to kill her husband. But the lover's pistol only clicks, and the husband shoots him instead. Gabrielle's duplicity...