Word: mauriac
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...centuries, the little town of Mauriac (pop. 4,300) nestled in comfortable obscurity amid the hills of central France. Then last March, hordes of inquisitive reporters and tourists in unprecedented numbers descended upon the somber community. Mauriac became front-page news, and an estimated 10 million Frenchmen tuned in for twice-a-day radio and television broadcasts from the center of town. The occasion for all of the hoopla: in one of the largest group efforts to kick the nicotine habit, 155 citizens of Mauriac decided to give up tobacco, cold turkey.* Their effort has been largely successful. More than...
...Coffin. Mauriac's antismoking campaign was inspired by Mayor Augustin Chauvet (who has not smoked in years) and gleefully promoted by ORTF, the state-run TV-radio network. To launch the crusade, a four-man team of psychologists and doctors held five days of meetings designed to wean the Mauriaquois from their smokes. At one gathering, Team Member Dr. Jean Pinet passed a miniature coffin around the audience. "Put your cigarettes in it," he exhorted, "or they'll put you in one." Other experts showed graphic films of the cancerous lungs of heavy smokers. The propaganda convinced many townspeople...
...films of French Director Eric Rohmer are so literary in method that they practically force viewers to grope for apt novelistic comparisons. His My Night at Maud's was suffused with a Catholic sensibility that evoked thoughts of Mauriac and James Joyce. Claire's Knee, with its themes of memory and desire, had critics remembering Proust. La Collectionneuse (The Collector), the third of Rohmer's irony-laden "moral tales" to reach the U.S., may well get audiences to thumbing their Nabokov...
...Mauriac carried his interior landscape to Paris, where it furnished him with boundless material for his writing. After two years of writing poetry, he turned to novels. His first succes d'estime, A Kiss for the Leper, was a projection of his own youthful fears. The leading character, an ungainly, misshapen provincial lad, marries a girl who is physically repelled by him. Only on his death can she begin to love him. Into The Leper are woven the themes that run through the later books: the subtle corruption of sensuality, the deep self-loathing that accompanies love, the glimmer...
Died. François Mauriac, 84, giant of French letters (see THE WORLD...