Word: mme
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While in Kilgore last fall, drilling scales into his mother's pupils, Van got a letter from Mme. Lhevinne suggesting that he enter the Moscow competition. He wavered awhile; his managers at Columbia Artists were cool to the idea, wanted him to go instead on a speculative, pay-your-way tour of Europe. But everybody he talked to thought he would win, and his eyes shone with the notion of taking the gold medal in Rachmaninoff's Moscow...
...Mischievous intriguer," "raven," "rascal,"-so Emperor Napoleon called Germaine de Staël, who became almost an obsessional hatred. When Mme. de Staël wrote her famed romance, Corinne, in 1807, the Emperor noted angrily that Corinne's heroine was English and its hero Scottish. He exploded: "I cannot forgive Mme. de Staël for having disparaged the French people." She was already banished from Napoleon's capital; when she appealed to return, he made her exile perpetual and ordered that she might not approach closer to Paris than 40 French leagues (100 miles...
Stoking Napoleon's hatred was the fact that flamboyant, liberty-loving Mme. de Staël had been one of the first to suspect his despotic ambitions. As France's First Consul, Napoleon had guessed, quite rightly, that Mme. de Staël "wanted to put him on guard against himself" and to play the part of mistress-adviser to him. But the Consul already had his eye on sylphish Juliette Récamier, wife of a Paris banker, had sent Minister Joseph Fouché to whisper in her ear: "The First Consul finds you charming." When, after...
Flowery Charms. "Weak" was hardly the word for either creature. Mme. de Staël was a carthorse Juno with a passionate imagination: she could talk for hours on any given subject without pausing to breathe. Her lovers were so numerous that they ran concurrently, like prison sentences. Mme. Récamier, on the other hand, was bright and lovely as a peacock and quick as a lizard at dodging through chinks. "She liked to stop everything in April," said Critic Sainte-Beuve with French delicacy-meaning that Mme. Récamier drove men half-crazy by drawing them hopelessly...
...Rhineland, Felix Krull begins life as the son of a somewhat shady operator who manufactures phony champagne. Deftly dodging the draft with a feigned fit of epilepsy, Felix lights out for Paris to live by his wits. He rehearses them at the border. When a wealthy woman, Mme. Houpflé (Susi Nicoletti), stands next to Felix during customs inspection, her jewel case somehow gets mixed up with his belongings, and he finds himself just too shy to mention the fact. Theft? Perhaps. But Felix likes to think of it as "manipulated luck...