Word: solferino
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Scene 1: The Rue de Solferino is a long winding street near the Eiffel tower that houses the Scoialist Party headquarters, sandwiched between a bakery and an apartment building. The night of the second round of the historic legislative elections on June 21, the crowd in front was thick and the mood festive. The Socialist Party, for the first time since its creation, had just won an absolute majority in parliament. For those present, this confirmation of France's "left turn" a month earlier--the election of Francois Mitterand as president--transformed a feeling of alienation into one of confident...
...Berlin journalist named Joseph Roth put this sensitivity into a fine novel, which Eva Tucker has translated beautifully. The novel tells about three generations of the Trotta family, beginning with the grandfather, a Slovene peasant named Joseph who accidentally saves his emperor's life at the Battle of Solferino. Afterwards everyone calls the peasant the hero of Solferino--even the schoolbooks retell the lies about him--and he becomes a baron...
...Carl Joseph becomes a moderately well-meaning lieutenant in an imperial army without much coherence or purpose. He causes the death of his only friend, the regimental surgeon whose memories of his own grandfather--a silver-bearded Jewish innkeeper--remind the lieutenant of the hero of Solferino. Carl Joseph makes love to an older woman, with "the heart of a girl of sixteen...a beautiful secret in a crumbling castle," he runs into debt, leaves the army, is killed in the war, all of it without much coherence or purpose. Not even the emperor can remember any longer just what...
...will or satisfaction--but he still kills people for wanting work that doesn't mean getting tuberculosis. All Roth's jokes, even the quietest, have a hard, tired edge to them. When Carl Joseph realizes that there are countries which haven't heard of the hero of Solferino, Roth says he's as confused as if he had realized...
...cheering streets of Milan. The French Tricolor fluttered from windows; there were Arches of Triumph made out of flowers, and at least one made out of cake. At Magenta, De Gaulle inspected the 4th Regiment of the plumed Italian Bersaglieri, whose predecessors fought there a century ago. Near Solferino, he and President Gronchi lunched at a villa where Napeleon III and Victor Emmanuel gloated over a victory banquet that had been set for the Emperor of Austria, who never got around...