Word: midi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...centuries, the sunbaked southern French provinces known as the Midi eked out their living supplying the rest of France with table wines; when the grapes were poor, so were the farmers. But no more. Today, along with wine, growing shipments of melons, asparagus, peaches and strawberries flow from the Midi into Paris. Responsible for this profitable bounty is a new network of dams, canals and irrigation ditches running from Marseille westward almost to the Spanish border. Responsible for the irrigation network is a 59-year-old northern Frenchman with the incontestably Gallic name of Philippe Lamour...
Born on a farm near the Belgian border, rugged Philippe Lamour migrated to Paris as a young man, became a successful lawyer and politician. In 1940, along with other Parisians, he fled south ahead of the Nazi panzers. Lamour never went back. He stopped running in the Midi town of Bellegarde, bought a rundown, 115-acre tract known as "The Farm of the Partridge," and settled down. At war's end, he added 50 more acres, traded in his horses for tractors and successfully grew strawberries and cauliflower in an area previously wedded to wine...
...Lamour had fallen in love with the Midi, but he recognized his love's faults. The sun shines brightly year-round in the Midi, but the 30 inches of rain that the area gets in an average year is concentrated in about 80 days. The obvious solution: irrigation. Visiting the U.S., Lamour studied TVA dams and California's irrigated valleys, then returned to the Midi to duplicate what he had seen...
Lamour's first task was to win the support of his fellow farmers in the lower Rhone Valley. He sparked the formation of a partly private, partly government development corporation and sent its agents into Midi homes to argue for an irrigation system that would wipe out the area's dependence on grapes alone. Lamour's advice to his agents: "Never refuse a glass of wine. Try to get on 'tu' and 'toi' terms with everyone...
...Other Reason. Debussy did not start his first important work-the Prelude a I'Aprés-midi d'un Fame-until he was 30. But during the next 15 years, he wrote enough to secure any composers reputation, including the revolutionary piano pieces, in which by deft use of the sustaining pedal he transformed the piano from a percussive to a harmonic instrument. Debussy's only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, surprised its audience at its 1902 premiere with its lack of crowd-catching arias or easily hummable melodies. But later audiences began...