Word: gallicisms
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...intellectual landscape created by French Novelist Boulle, the most interesting sight is a special stream of Gallic irony. His heroes drown in it before the reader's eyes, but even as they go down it is obvious that they all know how to swim. In The Bridge Over the River Kwai it was a British colonel whose fight for honor gave aid and comfort to the Japanese. In Not the Glory, it was a German spy whose best efforts aided the British. In his new novel, laid in a sleepy Provencal town among ordinary people...
...diplomacy when he published his third volume of fairy tales, L'Ourse aux Pattons Verts (The Lady Bear with the Little Green Paws), a group of stories about romantic princesses ready for marriage, fish that talk and a lady bear named Clementine, who is dedicated to an ancient Gallic ideal: liberty...
France is loaded with châteaux, tourists and musicians. Such is the Gallic sense of style that these disparate elements are now combined in an artistic enterprise that is also a moneymaker. The enterprise is called Son et Lumière (Sound and Light), and it amounts to setting all those chateaux to music...
...China, there was a distinct advantage in being a metis-the offspring of a foreigner and a Vietnamese. France generously granted citizenship to any Vietnamese with even a drop of French blood. Slant-eyed Eurasians, born of French soldiers or colons, learned in school that "our ancestors were the Gallic people." Eurasian men learned to drink cognac and vin rouge, the oftimes beautiful Eurasian women to wear Chanel perfume and Paris gowns. Vietnamese of mixed blood got the best jobs, were always considered a few steps above their fellow countrymen...
Oasis on the Riviera. Dominique, the heroine, is a law student, but essentially a kind of sophisticated Gallic equivalent of a rock-'n'-roller. She smokes incessantly, drinks Scotch methodically and goes to bebop dances at a nightclub called the "Kentucky."' Much of the time she is "bored passionately," and her casual, completely physical love affair with Bertrand, a fellow student, rarely takes the edge off that boredom. Then Bertrand introduces her to his uncle Luc and Dominique decides hopefully: "He's just the kind that seduces little girls like...