Word: parisian
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...dropped $490,000. A few days later, at Le Touquet, he lost heavily again, this time ironically playing beside an American businessman on vacation-Ralph Thomas Reed, president of American Express Co. Reed was not the only one who wondered at the recklessness of the mysteriously affluent Italian. A Parisian gossip columnist wrote an item about "a young Italian, Mr. Grassi, who never bets less than one million francs at a time at roulette," and makes the casino manager "shudder...
Society preceded sodomy. While Proust pursued halfhearted studies for the law and the diplomatic service, he put his passion into social climbing. The life of the salons provides Author Painter with the most fascinating and amusing section of his book. The Parisian wits skewered each other like shish kebab. At Mme. Aubernon's (a fat, lively little woman and the chief model for Mme. Verdurin in Remembrance), the subject for conversation was announced days in advance. "What is your opinion of adultery?" she asked Mme. Straus (a Duchesse de Guermantes model) when that was the theme. Mme. Straus replied...
Diabolic Ties. It was in this setting that Proust met the original of Swann, Charles Haas, who referred to himself as "the only Jew ever to be accepted by Parisian society without being immensely rich." Perhaps the most decadent and diabolical habitue of the salons was Comte Robert de Montesquieu, the original of Proust's depraved but magnificently Lear-like Baron de Charlus. Montesquiou was tall and thin, with a Kaiser mustache...
...manners, and morals of Bourbon France. Contemporary readers are likely to be more startled by the manners than the morals. The Queen's own gentleman-in-waiting thought nothing of dropping the royal hand for a moment "pour alter pisser contre la tapis-serie." Garbage filled the rank Parisian streets, but the stench of the dandies at court was almost as overpowering. The plumed and perfumed male of the era might choose from 50 shades of stockings with which to drape his shapely shanks. Some of the morosely fanciful hues: dying monkey, resuscitated corpse, lost time, mortal...
This gaudy story, filmed as J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I'll Spit on Your Graves), played at four Parisian theaters last week to enthusiastic reviews. But those who had read the novel from which the movie was made should have realized that it was a phony from the start. The Spitter was written 13 years ago by Boris Vian (a civil engineer by day, a jazz trumpeter in a Left Bank cave by night); its publishers claimed that it was a translation from a U.S. novel by one Vernon Sullivan. The public loved its fake sociology...