Word: mania
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...Medal Mania...
...article on France's current medal mania [Jan. 12] reminded me of André Gide's observation that by middle age all Frenchmen acquire two things: gonorrhea and the Légion d'Honneur...
According to one sardonic French saying, half the riders in the Paris Metro wear the Legion of Honor while the other half have applied for the medal. More than most people, the French love to get awards, and last week, at annual awards ceremonies, medal mania was in full swing. The country's most prestigious decoration, the Legion of Honor, was given to 1,500 men and women, including venerable (77) Film Director Rene Clair and Feminist Writer Louise Weiss, as well as a pop singer, a swimming champion, a truck driver and a physical-education teacher in Brazzaville...
Napoleon Bonaparte revived medal mania in earnest when he founded the Legion of Honor in 1802. Initially the Legion was supposed to be a corps of distinguished persons rewarded for "services eminents" to France...
...century drawing-Dürer, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo-was not uncommon. Today one would hardly be more surprised if a live dodo waddled into the Parke-Bernet auction room. Drawings also are not a young man's hobby; they demand a degree of patient connoisseurship (tinged with philatelic mania) that only the old usually have. But late last month a remarkable disproof of the rule went on show at Manhattan's Pierpont Morgan Library: a group of 115 works from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene V. Thaw...