Word: maman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Gases. Back with père et maman in Paris, young Ferdinand's grotesque adventures continue in mad spate. Father is a clerk, a monster of suspicion and self-pity; Mother deals in junk, which she tries to sell as antiques. They are failures, and Ferdinand thrashes them frightfully for it. He throws himself on the mercies of an uncle, who is a friend of Courtial Des Pereires, a prince of crackpots...
...with a patronizing sketch of her mother's dim life-pious, faithful, impoverished, with only one book dedicated to her, and that "published at the author's expense." She had not wept for her father, and she told her sister that it would be "the same for Maman." Yet, on the night that her mother went under the knife, "I went home; I talked to Sartre; we played some Bartok. Suddenly, at eleven, an outburst of tears that almost degenerated into hysteria. Amazement...
...neighbor's doorbell downstairs by mistake, then knocked on Mme. Vasseur's door-and found her son hiding behind a curtain. He could, of course, have easily escaped from France any time before then, but, as he explained, "I was in perfect joy to stay with Maman...
...certain sense, agreed with Mme. Vasseur. He testified that Vasseur was "emotionally castrated" by her as a child, and embraced his grisly Gestapo duties because they gave him a chance to express his virility. "To this day," observed the psychiatrist, "he always refers to her as Maman (Mummy), and suffered most in jail from seeing Maman only once a week." The court listened impassively, then sentenced him to be shot unless-as seems unlikely-Charles de Gaulle grants him a pardon. To the end he maintained that, although guilty of many crimes, "I swear on my mother's head...
...finesse and commanding personality, many Frenchwomen are already freer than the laws would indicate. Madame de Pompadour, after all, ruled France from the boudoir of Louis XV, and fully three-quarters of all French blue-collar workers voluntarily (so to speak) turn over their weekly pay envelopes to maman, who passes back a few francs for Gauloises and wine. Economically, French housewives are growing increasingly independent. With the growth in popularity of household time-savers like the automatic washer and le sandwich, some 30% of all married women find the time and energy to hold jobs outside the home, roughly...