Word: gime
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...Amateur. If Walpole seems today the very voice of the ancien régime, in his own time he had something of the avant-garde about him, even a touch of the enfant terrible. He invented his own fopperies, adapted his own fiction from the medieval, translated his own pleasures from the French. He had the ruling-class horror of being a professional, yet in his amateur way could claim with much truth that "no profession comes amiss to me." He was a printer, an innovating builder, an M.P., an antiquary, a historian, a novelist, a playwright, a collector...
Bedtime a I'ancien régime was a charade of pomp and circumstantial evidence. Each evening Louis XV pretended to occupy the monumental bed in the grandiose official apartment of Louis XIV at Versailles, while grand dukes and marquises vied to hold a candle or the King's nightshirt. As soon as the last light was snuffed out, Louis XV scrambled out of bed, scurried up a secret staircase and bedded down comfortably in his own cozy petit appartement. In the morning the whole absurd ritual began again in reverse...
What lends the book its interest, despite shortcomings, is a scattering of mixed-blood, split-level aristocrats, culturally nouveau riche but genealogically ancien régime, and some well-described scenes of a dismal garrison town with bored military wives and senior officers well past their World War I prime. Above all, there is the unusual setting. Despite the fact that Novelist Dohrman, 29, has spent only one week in Haiti, he manages to convey that the jungle to him is partly D. H. Lawrence's "blood-consciousness" and partly O'Neill's "dat ole davil...
Oracle in Paris. As the realization that there was a majority against Bourgès-Maunoury but no majority for anyone else dawned on France, it became conceivable that what had begun as a crise grave* might end as a crise de régime, i.e., the ultimate crisis of the Fourth Republic, which would force a fundamental change in its structure...
...always does, the mere thought of a crise de régime turned the talk to the ever-ready strongman, General de Gaulle. By the sheerest coincidence, the hawk-nosed wartime leader, now 66, chose last week to make one of his periodic excursions to Paris. Typically, De Gaulle's utterances had a Delphic quality. Said he: "You tell me that the political men of all groups are unanimous in affirming that only De Gaulle can find a solution. But name me one person who has said so in Parliament." Then he added: "I could not make peace...