Word: mercifulness
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...romantic fascination with the image of woman as sphinx, Medusa, castrator or remote, implacable goddess -the belle dame sans merci in her numerous fictive avatars-also figures in symbolist painting, especially in the world of Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), another member of Péladan's circle. Art or The Caresses conjoins a mysteriously smiling sphinx (looking not unlike a satisfied Rossetti redhead in a leopard coat that has grown onto her skin) with a puzzled-looking boy who has presumably come to answer her riddle. It is painted with a high, pale elegance that altogether removes it from...
...mainly read by Hornblower scholars who wish, as it were, to set their very stuns'ls in pursuit of their elusive literary quarry. As for the rest of us, one is put in mind of the French Gourmet Brillat-Savarin, who was once offered grapes for dinner. "Non, merci" he briskly replied, "je ne prends pas mon vin en pilules...
...this way: When Mary McCarthy arrived at "the more dignified status of Grande Dame," she left a vacancy as "Dark Lady of American Letters." With a timing she herself would be the first to appreciate, Miss Sontag appeared in the early 1960s to fill it, her belle-dame-sans-merci credentials already well in hand...
Because of the light-the shattering clarity that had seduced so many artists-Painter Marc Chagall in 1950 left Paris to live on the Riviera. Last week Chagall, now 79, said merci to the land of azure waters with a $2,000,000 gift: 17 major oils and 50 gouaches and watercolors, representing much of his last twelve years' work, which will be housed in a government-financed Chagall museum in Nice. When it is completed in 1968, the memorial will take its place beside the Riviera's three other museums dedicated to modern masters: Picasso...
Ambassador Thai also denied James Reston's report of last summer that the peasantry consider their rulers in Saigon "as merely the successors of the French colonial regime, with the upperclass urban Vietnamese replacing the French." "That's not true any more," he said, while accepting a cigarette "Merci...