Word: quai
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Quai has the normal political, economic and administrative activities common to any foreign service. What is unusual is the cultural arm, which gets nearly half of the Quai's $220 million budget. France exports more than 32,000 teachers of French and offers scholarships, exchanges, art exhibits, theatrical and musical tours, films, TV tapes...
...ability to express himself with elegance and precision is highly prized at the Quai. Novelist Remain Gary and Playwright Jean Giraudoux were foreign service officers; Poet St. John Perse (actually Alexis Leger) rose to the No. 2 post at the Quai; and Stendhal wrote The Charterhouse of Parma while in the diplomatic corps. Richelieu once effortlessly composed a 500-line insert for Corneille's verse drama, Le Cid, to replace a passage of the author's that Richelieu thought in bad taste...
Despite the French love of protocol, a pleasant informality reigns at the Quai. Any officer, however junior, can barge unannounced into the office of any other-with the exception of the minister, his secretary-general and the chief of personnel. Individualism is the fashion: if he wants to, an officer can bring his dog to the Quai, and even Couve de Murville occasionally appears with Jason, the son of Xenophon...
...training with producing minds that "operate with a rapidity and lucidity that is the envy of their colleagues." In any major capital of the world, invitations to French embassy affairs are valued above all others, and the French display what may be their greatest diplomatic asset-supreme elegance. The Quai has, of course, failures as well as successes. Some embassies are shockingly bad, especially those heavily manned by former colonial officers who retain a colonial mentality...
Disenchanted Comments. Perhaps because Couve de Murville is so nearperfect as a diplomat, he is elusive as a man. Respected but not loved by his Quai associates, he has the ministry machinery under total and constant control. He takes no notes, commits what he needs to know-which is practically everything-to his prodigious memory. Said one dazed aide: "Couve's been to practically all the conferences since 1945, and he can remember what Gromyko said at this one, what the British position was on that...