Word: michel
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Last week the French Ministry of Fine Arts ordered all construction stopped on the Boulevard St. Michel extension of the Paris Metro. Engineers and workmen were given a fortnight holiday. Excavating will continue during the fortnight, but instead of steam shovels and pneumatic drills, trained archeologists will be at work scraping the earth methodically away with garden trowels, ice picks, soup spoons. Fortnight ago the rattling drills of the subway contractors penetrated the long lost torture chambers of the Petit Châtelet. Last week the archeologists, scraping away with their soup spoons, declared that...
...Aloyse, but he too will soon be dead and his estate the prey of tax gatherers. Therefore the succession to the Throne of Liechtenstein was allotted, last week, to fall upon Prince Alfred Aloyse's 18-year-old grandson, Prince Franz Joseph Marie Aloyse Alfred Charles Jean Henri Michel Georges Ignace Benoit Gerard Majella de Liechtenstein. Thus only one, not two sets of inheritance taxes, will have to be paid before young Prince Franz ascends his minute Throne...
...Evidence. Twenty-year-old Michel's wooden pallet stretched narrowly between two seasoned convicts, murderers both. So Michel expected to escape, did he, as soon as he had learned from the "Aces" the finer points of his late thieving trade? Well, so had many another expected, and moreover struggled well on his way to freedom when manhunters tracked him down, and goaded him back to the solitary confinement, disease and starvation of Devil's Island (famed for the incarceration of Dreyfus...
...salable boxes, or penny errands might be run for the slave-drivers, and bit by tarnished bit the price of attempt at freedom could be bought. Five hundred francs would bribe a bushman to paddle one convict across to the jungle, and buy a few days' scanty provisions. Michel achieved the jungle, staggered and bruised his way through to Paramaribo, only to be arrested as he tried to board a Dutch freighter, and shipped summarily back to an extra twist of the screw...
Broken in spirit and body, Michel became at last "liberé" (fantastic name for those wretches who survive imprisonment, but, exiled for years to come, must report periodically to the Guiana authorities). Meanwhile there was the listless scramble for barest necessities of existence. Few as these were after prison fare, the possibilities of work were fewer still, since employers preferred gangs of supervised prisoners available at minimum wage. Michel, marveled at his long-lost joie de vivre, remembered his ambitions, and the oath that never would he degenerate to a contemptible liberé, crouched on his empty barrow awaiting...