Word: soragna
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Since he was to sign the peace treaty for his beaten country, Italian plenipotentiary the Marchese Meli-Lupi di Soragna put on his best black tailcoat (now a little tight) and his striped pants (ever so slightly frayed at the cuffs). Outside, in the courtyard of the Italian Embassy, he patted his top hat, caressed his iron-grey mustache, and glanced at the clouded sky. To Paris Cop PauL Simon, on guard by the gate, Soragna remarked: "Some rain coming, I think," and after a pause, "I have a disagreeable task this morning." Cop Simon merely nodded cheerfully...
...Soragna stepped into his black Packard, rode to the Quai d'Orsay and through the iron gates to the French Foreign Ministry. The diplomats of the victorious Allies were assembled there in the graceful old Salon de 1'Horloge, with its five big windows overlooking the murky Seine, where in 1856 the Crimean War had come to an end, where Clemenceau had ratified the Treaty of Versailles, and where the Kellogg-Briand pact to outlaw war had been signed...
While the Allied representatives, led by Russia, put their names to the Italian peace treaty, Soragna waited. Then, pale but deliberate, he stepped to the big table* in the nearby Galeria de la Paix, and signed for Italy. After his departure, the representatives of Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Finland signed...
Back at the Embassy gate, Cop Simon had found his tongue. As Soragna stepped out Simon observed cheerfully, "The sun has come out, monsieur." The Italian nodded. He was heading back to Rome, where Italians were working themselves into spasms of grief over the treaty he had just signed. "The fatherland is in mourning," said black-bordered newspapers in Rome...
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