Word: verdurin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...passion into social climbing. The life of the salons provides Author Painter with the most fascinating and amusing section of his book. The Parisian wits skewered each other like shish kebab. At Mme. Aubernon's (a fat, lively little woman and the chief model for Mme. Verdurin in Remembrance), the subject for conversation was announced days in advance. "What is your opinion of adultery?" she asked Mme. Straus (a Duchesse de Guermantes model) when that was the theme. Mme. Straus replied, "I'm so sorry; I prepared incest by mistake...
Someone ought to do for Gaylord [Babbitt] what Proust did for Madame Verdurin.* It would be a public service to publish a catalogue of the dreary cliches of so-called avant-gardism, and to point out that old George, with his uncomplicated enthusiasm for baseball and civil philanthropy, was no more hostile to genuine intellectual independence than Junior, with his exhibitionistic juggling of the phrases of psychoanalysis and wine tasting...