Word: vigne
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...reasons for the rise of junk are not hard to find: a yearning for hand-crafted individuality in a mass-produced world, the increasing rarity of genuine antiques of all kinds, and the prohibitive cost of beautiful ones. So, as Mme. de Sévigné might have put it, "If one can't be beautiful, one can at least be amusing." And, used sparingly and with imagination, these humble relics are often amusing indeed...
...dinner for Louis XIV, according to Mme. de Sévigné, the grand chef de cuisine at the Château Chantilly killed himself rather than face the Sun King without enough fish for his pièce de résistance. Fortunately, no such tragedy marred last week's visit of Britain's Queen Elizabeth to France, although one great cake prepared in her honor collapsed from the heat before she got to it and had to be hurriedly propped up. No one's life was held forfeit, and the first visit of a reigning...
...brief biographical introduction, British Essayist Violet Hammersley outlines the life that drove Madame de Sévigné to ink. Widowed at 25 when her chronically unfaithful husband was killed in a duel over his latest mistress,* Madame de Sévigné succumbed to the grand passion of possessive mother love for her only daughter. Cold, proud and wildly extravagant, the daughter was a great beauty and Madame de Sévigné married her off to a rich, twice-widowed count. But when her daughter left her side, Madame de Sévigné began carrying a literary...
Like Oscar Wilde's strong-minded dowager, Lady Bracknell, Madame de Sévigné held that "health is the primary duty of life." She was her daughter's full-time amateur diagnostician, strongly opposed to bloodletting, but an advocate of "viper soup," i.e., snake consomme. Often Madame de Sévigné sounds rather like a faded copy of "Versailles Confidential." ("At one fell stroke the other day, the Queen lost 20,000 crowns and missed hearing Mass.") Letter-Writer De Sévigné is more fun when she is consciously making her own mots...
...told you . . ." The woman who had been burned as a witch, La Voisin by name, was no innocent victim but a notorious poisoner and promoter of Black Masses. She symbolized the strange, diabolic resistance movement that flourished beneath the surface of official society, just as Madame de Sévigné symbolized the outer serenity and almost Japanese exactitude of social forms. There is no evidence that her 17th century mind understood that underground passion for evil any more than the passion for sainthood. She could only sigh with stoic disenchantment: "What hope can there...