Word: huguenot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sharp-eyed critics watching his performance, it was incredible that Actor Robert Preston Meservey should have spent a dozen years as a second-string Hollywood leading man. Bon of a French Huguenot and Irish line, Robert was two years old when his parents moved from Newton Highlands, Mass, to the going-to-seed Lincoln Heights section of Los Angeles. He grew up, among Italian and Mexican families, in a neighborhood dotted with rundown homes. But the Meserveys were a close-knit unit. Bob's mother fed her family on music, and as a small boy Bob learned to play...
Savage Play has only a few other things to offer besides literary mud. There are some sharply evocative sketches of French aristocrats in the old-fashioned countryside, and of French Protestants in a prim, latter-day Huguenot Parisian flat. And there is the strange children's world in which cruelty is mixed with utter innocence. The novel won the 1950 Prix Goncourt and sold 100,000 copies in France. But then, French tastes have always been rather special...
...important was the problem of religious individuality. Claudel gloried in Catholicism as a "closed system," and frankly stated that because "departures from [Catholic] doctrine involve the soul in terrible risk of eternal damnation, [the church] cannot admit what people call liberty of thought . . ." Gide, bred in a tradition of Huguenot Protestantism, could never accept this view. In one of his rare offensives, he wrote Claudel that he could not abide those Catholics who "use the crucifix as if it were a bludgeon...
...Boers are a little different. Fifty-six years ago, in Following the Equator, Mark Twain described the Boer as: "deeply religious, profoundly ignorant, dull, obstinate, bigoted ...proud of his Dutch and Huguenot origin and its religious and military history . . . He has stood stock still in South Africa for two centuries and a half, and would like to stand still till the end of time...
Thou Shalt Not. Malan got religion early. He was born of French Huguenot stock in a farmstead named Allesverloren (Everything Is Lost), which snuggled among the soaring mountains and vine-garlanded valleys of West Cape Province. In his parents' devout household, the rule was "Thou Shalt Not." Each evening "Danie" and his younger brother Fanie were called indoors to hear spade-bearded Papa Malan reading from his family Bible to his black servants...