Word: perdus
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Nowhere is it more brilliantly manifested than in his lawcourt drawings: the pompous judges, the robed lawyers whispering their deals and making their pleas, the cavernous Piranesian spaces of the anteroom to the Palace of Justice known as the Salle des Pas-Perdus, or Room of Wasted Steps, the frightened clients, the stone-faced ushers, the bewildered accused in the dock. It took another 19th century genius, Dickens, to convey in fiction what Daumier gives in line and wash: the sense of the law, not as a means toward fairness or justice but as an enormous and self-feeding machine...
...mosquitoes, the revolutions of the stomach are all forgotten or, better yet, transfigured into the unforgettable adventures with which we can impress our friends. Paradise's loss is our gain. Small wonder that Proust, great poet laureate of reminiscence, wrote, "Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu'on a perdus." Nothing is ever what it used...
...enlisted during World War I, only about 10% were put into overseas combat outfits. With one exception their battlefield record was not so good. Exception was Harlem's 369th. Officered mostly by white men the 369th was brigaded with the French who called its black men les enfants perdus (the lost children) because of their separation from the rest of the A. E. F. The regiment lost 1,100 men killed and wounded, won 172 individual French and American decorations, was able to brag that it had never lost a foot of ground to the enemy or surrendered...
...punctually Editor Aymard and Cartoonist Sennep turned up arm-in-arm in La Salle des Pas-Perdus (the hall of lost footsteps) in which journalists and deputies pace. They were set upon by a pack of Socialist statesmen. Elderly Editor Aymard jerked a dog whip from his pocket, laid about him. Deputy Barthe, a questor of the Chamber, rushed up in an attempt to preserve order as was his duty, caught the whip full across his face...
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