Word: gime
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...this somewhat speculative re-creation of the ancien régime is solidly based on Darnton's mastery of its most obscure documents. He has discovered, for example, that there was a police official who spent the years 1748 to 1753 writing more than 500 still unpublished dossiers covering virtually every writer in Paris. They included all those troublesome philosophes whose skeptical criticisms of the Bourbon monarchy contributed to its downfall, yet this diligent police analyst never used the term philosophes, never considered them as a group, never imagined that any writers could have political importance...
Throughout his New World adventure, however, Lafayette remained curiously immune to the principles he was fighting for. "It had not yet occurred to him that democracy was for export," writes Bernier. The soldier returned to France an enthusiastic supporter of the ancien régime. Yet as the toast of Paris salons, he met some of the new egalitarian thinkers of the day and became a genuine convert to the cause of democracy. His new ideals and his ever growing popularity drew him into the French Revolution, and at 31 he became vice president of the new National Assembly...
...beyond her. On a line like "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is," she puts equal stress on "potent" and "cheap" so that the fun is missing and the meaning is blurred. What she has doffed in avoirdupois she has put on in ancien Louis B. Mayer régime costumery, particularly one black-and-white Theoni V. Aldredge outfit that makes her look like a Hollywood penguin...
...County. Though it includes the town of Palm Beach, this incubator for the newly wealthy is snob years distant from that small, code-ridden oasis of blue blood and encrusted money. The Gold Coast nouveaux, for the most part lustier, sportier and much younger than the ancien régime of Worth Avenue, converge from all over the world to flaunt their millions. As Ralph Destino, president of Cartier, puts it, "They've carved out a new and unique style. There's nothing anywhere that parallels the mix of things here...
Mindful that the work was composed in 1787, on the eve of the French Revolution, Losey chooses to see it as a drama of conflict between a cynical, depleted ancìen régime and the exploited lower orders. He tacks on an epigraph from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: ". . . the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appears." His Don, solemnly played by Ruggero Raimondi, is a joyless, brooding creature whose compulsive sexuality is merely a neurotic reflection of social tensions. Losey gives us the least passionate seducer...