Word: monsieur
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...days when the spirit of France shot up and gushed forth like a fountain. That "honor and sainthood are his two absolutes" reminds me of that French sea captain in Conrad's Lord Jim, who on diagnosing Jim's trouble in the Patna affair, finishes "the honor, monsieur! . . . The honor . . . that is real" and goes away-his shabby cape swinging...
Today Marc Chagall says of surrealism "Not for me." A hater of realism as well, he refuses to be joined by any artistic school. He will not even discuss his own work. "Monsieur," he says in his dense Vitebsk French (he speaks no English), "l'art est comme l'amour. If your wife is ugly, you do not talk about her looks. If she is beautiful, they speak for both...
...affection and esteem. Furthermore, it was a token more permanent and honest than the conventional photograph, since one's bottom changes less rapidly and radically than one's face, the latter being exposed to wind and weather as well as the ravages of time." The human face, Monsieur de Malancourt remarked, is like that of a fish and has been immemoriably, much over-rated as an art-object...
...Bourbon (now Reunion) in the Indian Ocean. It was exotic after Salem, but not as exotic as Bowditch seemed to the French when he blushed at their conversations. "Il n'a pas encore perdu sa pucelage," a Frenchman explained to a French lady. "Quelle âge avez-vous, monsieur?" she asked Bowditch. "Twenty-three." The French lady threw up her hands: "C'est une chose absolument impossible de conserver la pucelage á cette...
...Monsieur Hitler. . . . Monsieur Hitler is just part of the combination. It's the world that is cracking, our world. ... Do you know why? It's because of the worms, I mean people like me, the lice-covered malheureux, the syphilitic, tubercular garbage eaters, the great unwashed. It's we who have gnawed away the substance. . . . We have been chewing at the pillars of society since the foundation of the world. . . . There is nothing beneath your feet, absolutely nothing. . . . Earthquakes are nothing compared with what old Europe is going...