Word: parisian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Dedicated Rumormonger Jean-Noel Kapferer, 38, has heard those spurious stories and some 10,000 other tales. A Parisian academic, Kapferer, in 1984, created the Foundation for the Study of Rumors. His office, not far from the Paris Stock Exchange, runs a 24-hour hotline dedicated to collecting examples of tattle while they are still fresh. "It's very important to hear about them the instant they start," he says. "A rumor is like a fire. You have to be on the spot. Otherwise you find yourself working on hearsay about hearsay...
...really didn't matter that I had to return it. I had taken my notes and I had all the information I would need about how the popular press and the popular Parisian press viewed royal mistresses in general and Madame du Barry in particular. More importantly, however, I had been able to hold a piece of the reality I am trying to reconstruct...
...Parisian dramatist Jean Cocteau once characterized his fellow Frenchmen as a bunch of Italians in a bad mood. As thumbnail assessments go, that may have been incomplete, but it was not too far off the mark. France last week continued to be seized by a wave of train and other public-service strikes that have disrupted the country for a month. Not only was the typical Frenchman's mood even sourer than usual, but there were numerous signs that French political life, and daily life for that matter, was Italianizing at the edges. The successive crises that have beset...
...least as old as the French custom of hospitality is the tradition of terrorism. In 1894 anarchists killed French President Sadi Carnot. During that era bombs exploded regularly in Parisian theaters, cafes, police stations and courts. After two obscure terrorists bombed the Chamber of Deputies, the president of that body waited for the smoke to clear, then said, "Gentlemen, the meeting continues." In the 1870s the Communards executed 60 hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy, during a two-month insurrection that took at least 20,000 lives. A century later the famed Middle East terrorist Carlos, also known...
...makes up for it to some extent by being fully aware of his faults. At one point he reminds himself: "Don't talk all the time. It is an error to suppose that other people can have nothing interesting to say." At another, while dining in a Parisian cafe with his fourth wife, Elena, he sees himself in a wall mirror and "was horrified at the contrast between my big-bellied person and my red and swollen face, with a not too pleasant expression about the eyes and the mouth, and Elena's exquisite slimness and delicacy...