Word: gallicisms
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French humor prides itself on its elegantly turned irony (Anatole France) and the clean bite of its wit (Voltaire, Molière), but it also has a more modern and less celebrated side: what Parisian slang calls loufoque-zany. The practitioners of this form of Gallic humor consist of a small army of chansonniers, moviemakers, Left Bank beachcombers and cartoonists. The cartoonists have now formed an avant-garde to invade the U.S. cartoon market. Some are funny enough to get through, but most will succeed only if they catch Americans with their advance guards down, their sleeves rolled...
...Best Cartoons from France is a collection of pictorial comment by two score cartoonists on art, women, children and other forms of human folly. It is more zany than sane, but often makes sound Gallic sense anyway. When a young girl proves too bashful to take off her clothes for the artist painting a nude of her, the painter displays exquisite French delicacy by discreetly peeking into her dress. When a young man is happily reading a book in bed, the source of his contentment is clear from the trophy on the wall: crossed rifle and sword topped...
...prison, the rigorous moralist writing his story extends his compassion and pleads for that of the reader. In Le Fanu's The Room in the Dragon Volant, a rich and credulous Englishman is tricked on a trip to France by a pretty girl and a couple of Gallic sharpsters, but emerges somewhat wiser from the coffin in which they have nailed him. In Meredith's The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper, a complex English lady joins battle with a simple British general, reduces his defenses, and finally takes him into her camp as a lifetime ally...
Soprano Victoria de los Angeles, though she is only 30, made a matronly-looking Marguerite, but her singing was faultless as a flute. For a man who has just been rejuvenated by the devil, Swedish Tenor Jussi Bjoerling looked pudgy, but he sang with Gallic smoothness. Conductor Monteux. with no apparent effort, achieved a nearly perfect balance between orchestra and singers...
...Little Novels of Sicily (Grove). Verga, who died in 1922, was one of Italy's great writers, and these strong, tender stories of life at its most universal levels are among his best. After Verga, Frenchman Gil Buhet's The Innocent Knights (Viking) may seem like Gallic fluff. Actually, it is a charming story about a gang of schoolboys who shut themselves up in a moated ruin until their unjust elders and schoolmasters are ready to treat them like human beings...