Word: jerphanion
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...Jerphanion, now vice president of the Radical-Socialist Party. He delivers a long, dull speech (which Romains unblushingly describes as "great"). With an ex-diplomat he investigates a death among the mountain people of his native province-a death which might be from hard conditions of life in a snowbound farmhouse without medical aid, or might be murder...
...from a poor real-estate speculator to financier. In Work and Play he sets about divorcing his wife (and ex-secretary). He also gets mixed up, to his embarrassment, with architects, interior decorators and his private secretary, backs a play for his mistress and tries to hire politically ambitious Jerphanion as his secretary...
Laulerque. The old disillusioned conspirator who tried to make a secret international order work for the common good is embarrassed at Jerphanion's tentative project for a new secret society that would have liberal aims, honest methods and yet be as effective as the Communists...
Life does not revolve around the individual, said Jules Romains. His importance is rather his place in, and movement through, the cellular structure of contemporary society. Thus the story of Jerphanion coming to Paris was not his individual career, but his being, as one of the units, in the entity known as Paris, which was greater than the sum of its citizens...
...European capitalists are coming to Moscow "like so many giant corpuscles working towards an abscess." Corpuscle Haverkamp and Corpuscle Champcenais are among them; their attitude towards Soviet Russia is that of imperial colonizers toward a savage kingdom. Warmer and more confused is the attitude of Minister Buitton and Jerphanion, who is his secretary. But Jerphanion confesses: "What I actually found was a lot of noisy fellows who started lying from the word go . . .in order to deceive me and send me away with a wholly fallacious idea which they expected me to broadcast...