Word: highborn
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...with tales of teeming millions, exotic landscapes, seemingly outlandish manners and morals. Even today some Americans have a vision of China that is a fanciful montage of antithetical images: Confucius and Kung Fu; Wellesley-educated Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Mao's "sinister" widow Chiang Ch'ing; highborn ladies tiptoeing painfully on bound feet and unisex masses marching in bulky Mao jackets; delicately misty watercolors and propaganda posters as crude as comic strips; hundred-year-old eggs and gunpowder; opium dens and Buddhist pagodas; the imperturbable mandarin sage and the fanatical archcriminal Dr. Fu Manchu...
...author's good sense in becoming an American is readily apparent, especially to Americans. To him France is all but fossilized, and his highborn relatives there are wholly so, as the funniest parts of his account maliciously attest. (Ted Morgan's Uncle Armand once brought Marcel Proust to lunch. Afterward the due de Gramont, Armand's father, handed his guest book to the already famous author "and with the total disdain of the nobleman for the artist, said, 'Just your name, Mr. Proust. No thoughts.' ") The U.S. he sees as still an open society, free...
...scarlet dragoon's uniform, he preens before a mirror and loftily mouths stanzas from Byron. Playing the highborn gentleman, though fooling no one, Con charges over the countryside on a thoroughbred mare while reducing his daughter to a barroom slavey. He sneers at the Yankees as vulgar traders while owing them money and enjoying none of their trade...
Much is known of Geoffrey Chaucer's life, much lost. He was a vintner's son who rose (through cleverness and, no doubt, the ability to entertain highborn ladies with after-dinner recitals) to become a government official, courtier and diplomat under three successive monarchs - Edward II, Edward III and Richard II. He was at least briefly a soldier, and while fighting in France under the Black Prince, he was captured, then ransomed for ?16. The smallness of this sum is a favorite joke among Chaucerians, but it amounts to $3,840 in modern terms, by Gardner...
...rendered in English as fake-childish poetry. As always, slave-ship captains and plantation owners are shown as psychopathic hypocrites-consulting Scripture in one scene, condoning, even participating in violence and rape in the next. Naturally, a Simon Legree figure is always handy to do their dirty work, while highborn white ladies dither prettily in the background...