Word: mme
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...plot never appears, but no one complains. The atmosphere is everything and consists of equal parts dance, costume, and dialogue. The action starts at Mme. Dubonnet's Finishing School on the French Riviera, full of charmingly frivolous creatures of the Twenties ("They do chatter so!") gaily bent on little more than gossip, the Charleston and, of course, boys. The boys pop in and out innocuously enough as the shifts from the school to le plage and finally to the Cafe Patallon for the ball. It's all good...
...Independent One. The daughter of South Viet Nam's present Ambassador to the U.S., Mme. Ngo married at 15, was soon smack in the middle of her country's resistance first to the French, and then to the Communists. Thrown into prison in 1946, she escaped, joined the partisans. Today, in her bustling office in the palace, which because of its busyness she calls Le Moulin (the mill), she handles a bewildering assortment of visitors and letters asking every sort of favor, from help in curbing an abusive husband to advice on a Latin essay. She manages...
Three years ago Mme. Ngo began dipping into ancient files and poring over old laws and codes to draw up what was to become a declaration of independence for women. She wrote drafts in Vietnamese. French and English, sent them to legal experts all over the world for comment. Meanwhile, evoking the magic name of Trung, she rallied the women to the cause, soon began having sleepless nights and nightmares about the situations her bill did not cover, would furiously scribble notes in the night for the next day's revision...
...Fickle Ones. In the Assembly, the opposition was not large, but it was noisy. Male delegates talked interminably about the value of tradition. Just when Mme. Ngo thought she had won them over in committee, they would wriggle free. "Really," complained Mme. Ngo, "men change their minds much more easily than women." But gradually, in an Assembly tightly controlled by her brother-in-law, the opposition melted, and last week the Family Bill became the law of the land...
...were legitimate, or repudiate his wife at whim. A married man, seen too often in the company of an unmarried woman, is apt to find himself having to explain his conduct to the authorities. In the first version of the bill, divorce was outlawed entirely. But on this point, Mme. Ngo did not quite get her way: the Assembly passed an amendment empowering the President to grant divorces in cases where marriage had clearly become intolerable...