Word: napoleons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...spoke for a powerful and united France, Talleyrand's 19th century role was most often like De Gaulle's: to make the world pay heed to a beaten, broken France. Superbly confident, cool under the worst conditions, Talleyrand once sat calmly through an hour-long tirade by Napoleon Bonaparte and heard himself called everything from a liar and a traitor to a coward and a thief. In a final paroxysm, Napoleon described him as a "silk stocking full of merde." Without turning a hair, Talleyrand left the room, remarking only, "What a pity a great man should...
...Napoleon III. The interior is extravagantly decorated in Empire style, full of gold, plush, tapestries and murals, one of which depicts the four continents-with the Americas, of course, represented by a red Indian. The rooms are choked with history: in the Salon de 1'Horloge, the Versailles Treaty was negotiated and the Kellogg-Briand Pact signed; in the Gallery de la Paix, the late President John Kennedy received guests on his 1961 visit; the Big Four held many of their postwar meetings in the Salon de Beauvais...
Marie-Josephe-Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie had two great loves. One was "Napoleon Bonaparte, who called her "my matchless little mother" and made her his Empress; the other was Paul Barras, revolutionist and member of the Directory, who remarked that "she would have drunk gold out of the skull of her lover" and referred to her as "the lewd Creole." Barras' estimate of Josephine was the one accepted by most 19th century biographers of Napoleon -chiefly, suggests Historian Ernest Knapton, because she left behind so few words in her own defense (only one "certain and authentic" letter...
This merely contributes to the outrage of French motorists. France has an exquisite network of roads, lined with noble colonnades of trees. They run straight as arrows from one picturesque village to another. But these blacktop paths are nearly as narrow as in Napoleon's time (when they were designed), and are totally inadequate to the 10 million vehicles now struggling to get from place to place...
Jaunty old Canon Kir is a Gallic equivalent of the late Fiorello La Guardia-a Napoleon-sized (5 ft. 3 in.) "autocrat" with no inhibitions. In his normal dress of beret, black cassock and high-laced shoes, Kir occasionally descends on the gendarmé directing traffic at Dijon's Coin du Miroir, takes over, creates monumental traffic tie-ups. At the inauguration of a new public school gymnasium, Kir, cassock and all, shinnied up five feet of rope to answer a photographer's challenge. When he found himself locked out of his apartment, Kir stalked back...