Word: mamma
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...Sardines [for supper] . . . could scarcely swallow them . . . This is Sunday ... I will read the new version of the Bible . . . Encyclopedia Britannica [steadies] my nerves ... To bed early . . . shut my eyes and imagine a terraced abyss, each terrace occupied by a beautiful maiden [but I] only saw [my wife] and Mamma . . . Sleep...
Papa was already the father of six, but overjoyed at the news. "Oh, my dear darling wife!" said he, "we haven't had one for ages. I love babies." Mamma, who had to run the household on 250 francs a month, said coldly: "So you're glad for me to bring another poor wretch into the world?" And Papa replied: "Of course I'm glad. It'll be a boy this time, he'll be born in 1900, beginning his life with a world's fair...
...after Papa had lost his considerable cotton fortune in Savannah, he took a job as manager of a cotton agency in Le Havre. Mamma did wonders with his small pay and her almost total lack of French. The children born in France had to ask others what Mamma said when she scolded them in English, though both parents tried to "prevent us from becoming expatriate mongrels." As the years passed, easygoing Papa became fairly well off and brought his family to a comfortable home in Paris. But it was Mamma, tiny and handsome, who staved off the early crises...
...parents, though they never returned to the U.S., firmly refused to think of themselves as expatriates. The children, too, still consider themselves Americans. Papa, unable to get bourbon, made his mint juleps with French brandy, sold U.S. cottonseed oil with enthusiasm and regularly leafed through Southern history. As for Mamma, nothing cheered her so much as an American visitor. Writes daughter Anne: "She felt herself to be an island around which surged forty million incurious French. . . . When she spoke of herself as a Southerner, these foreigners understood her to mean South America and that was a bad start, so Mamma...
...prompting men regardless of seniority. Though he sometimes gets up at 2 a.m. and works until dawn, he always has time for children. Visitors often come upon him and his four grandchildren ("Gumdrops," he calls them), rolling and shrieking on the floor, while his wife ("Pistol Packin' Mamma") looks...