Word: goncourts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...were even yet willing to accept Oswald Spengler's bracing pessimism about the age: "There is no question of prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice." But there was a growing sense that the Brothers de Goncourt had been grimly farsighted when they wrote in their Journal...
...story, based on Roger Vercel's Goncourt Prize novel, Remorques (published in the U.S. as Salvage-TIME, Jan. n, 1937), is lacking in what the U.S. trade likes to call "big story values." Nothing much happens. Tugboat Captain Gabin, married for ten years to a nice, affectionate little blonde, suddenly finds that he's mad about Mile. Morgan. Except for a few convincing details, that's practically the whole plot...
Berlin fell. Hitler was reported dead. Paris was deeply stirred-for Gabrielle Colette, author of The Gentle Libertine and 20 other novels about love, had been elected to the Académie Goncourt. Now she would sit with "The Ten," the living literary immortals who each year award the Prix Goncourt to the best French novel. One newspaper killed Hitler's obituary to make way for Colette's biography...
Colette, 72, and heavily mascaraed, accepted the honor as an inevitable tribute to France's foremost woman writer. She breezed to the Goncourt election luncheon in a big black car. She hobbled with arthritic grace across the sidewalk through a lane of admirers and fellow Academicians. To flashbulbing cameramen she cried: "Mes enfants, you are ridiculous! You are machine-gunning me!" Archly she posed her frizzled, felt-hatted, grey head and pointed her sandaled, red-toenailed feet. What had she done during the occupation? "Mes enfants, I did the same thing as the last 15 years: nothing. I didn...
...enough of it." Mediums sprang to fame, set the ether vibrating with spirit music, spirit painting, voices, lights, icy currents of air, luminous faces, words written in fire. "A whole mine of mysticism hatching beneath the skepticism of the 19th Century," said the shrewd French Diarists Edmond and Jules Goncourt...