Word: skinflints
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...Ippolita, by Alberto Denti di Pirajno. Highly reminiscent of The Leopard, and written, as was that excellent novel, by an aging Sicilian duke, Ippolita draws an evocative portrait of semifeudal Italian society amid the first revolutionary stirrings in the early 19th century. The author depicts princes, peasants, and his skinflint heroine with melodramatic gusto, but his most exact and memorable character is the past itself...
This was the age in which Metternich said that "the levels of man commenced with baron." Ippolita marries one-Baron Konrad von Grueber-and it becomes the ruefully comic epic of Ippolita's skinflint life to retrieve her one uncharacteristic act of giving herself to him. The baron is a madcap giant of a hussar, a Homeric drinker and eater, an impenitent gambler, an indefatigable skirt chaser. Ippolita, to whom purse strings are the only heart strings, chokes as her beans-and-mush menus give way to roast pigs, shank sausage and plump capons. She likes to dress like...
...snaring Horace Vandergelder (Paul Ford), possibly the richest merchant in all Yonkers in 1884. Her mission is complicated by the merchant's preference for finance rather than romance. "Marriage," he snorts, "is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder." Even worse, the old skinflint seems set on marrying somebody young. Author Wilder's solution, which involves exploding tomato tins, a pair of Vandergelder's clerks uprooting the City of New York, a pretty milliner whose rival is purely mythical, and a demoniac dinner party, makes no sense at all-but does make...
...Mexico" named Don Pedro Mejia joined with a viceroy to monopolize all the Indian maize and wheat in the country. The Indians and the poor appealed to the church, and Mexico's archbishop put the extortioner under a ban of excommunication. This failed to move the rich skinflint, so the church suspended all divine service. This meant total war, and the viceroy moved to arrest the archbishop. Gage's picture of the archbishop-mitered, robed, with the Host in his hand defying the King's officers-is a great scene despite Gage's intention; he only...
There is Cousin Honora, a whimsical skinflint who counts out the pennies to Leander's family and moves with haughty assurance from painting to the piano to whatnot, casually giving them up in turn and winding up in her old age as a Red Sox fan. But not even Honora can stay in the same league with old Cousin Justina, who is richer still (she married a five-and-dime prince) and dominates the lives of a little circle of pathetic hangers-on who are dependent upon her charity. When she discovers that Leander's son Moses...