Word: talleyrand
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...grave historical significance, Stavisky remains first and foremost a mood picture, an evocation of a sensibility. Stavisky's mise en scene is more important than its philosophical point. Its characters are only skin deep, if they go even that far--usually they stop, on purpose, at the make-up. Talleyrand said of those who were born after 1789 that they could never really know how good life could be. The same feeling--a combination of nostalgia, snobbery, and contempt for the newfangled present--permeates Stavisky. The final value judgement on this feeling, though, is thoroughly ambiguous. The life...
...that the Revolution did not seriously affect the development of French painting." Thus when it came, the successful portraitists-most of whom, like the gifted Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, were women-simply turned from painting the court to recording the features of eminences like Robespierre and Talleyrand...
...Nixon will not be remembered in history for the rapprochement with Russia and China or peace in the Middle East-this honor will and should go to Kissinger. Everyone remembers Talleyrand and Metternich, but nobody today recalls whom they worked...
...homesick Marie-Louise, who stuffs herself with Austrian chocolate and drinks coffee in clear violation of the Emperor's trade-war embargo. Napoleon's mother, Madame Mere, casts a practical Corsican eye on ephemeral pomp and circumstance, while prudently stuffing gold in her socks. And of course Talleyrand appears, ceaselessly tacking for advantage and trimming his sails at the hint of rough weather...
...pornography is brutish. It is because, when the routine conventions of his work are subtracted, Boucher remains a startling and almost great painter. The sensuousness, the lively plasticity of drawing, the marvelous sensitivity to color and texture, the ironic grasp of elaborate mythologies and allegories still remind us of Talleyrand's wistful epitaph on the ancien régime - that no one who did not live before the Revolution can know the sweetness of life...