Word: woman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Born in the Rhineland, Felix Krull begins life as the son of a somewhat shady operator who manufactures phony champagne. Deftly dodging the draft with a feigned fit of epilepsy, Felix lights out for Paris to live by his wits. He rehearses them at the border. When a wealthy woman, Mme. Houpflé (Susi Nicoletti), stands next to Felix during customs inspection, her jewel case somehow gets mixed up with his belongings, and he finds himself just too shy to mention the fact. Theft? Perhaps. But Felix likes to think of it as "manipulated luck...
...spent 23 years in Florence, and wrote against debt like Dostoevsky. She had a desperate, long and painful affair with a romantic Italian who claimed to be the inventor of the first gasoline engine. She seems to have committed the one fatal mistake a woman can make with a man-she made him feel a fool. Came the day when her lover cut her dead in public...
...woman soon enters a rival claim to the succession, and she advances her pretensions in a woman's devious way. She makes the old man promise that if she gives him a son, he will make that son his heir. Whereupon, since the old man has lost his sexual strength, she proceeds to seduce the young one. Suspecting nothing, the son connives so enthusiastically at his own disinheritance that he wins her heart as he gives her a child. The child is born and everybody is happy, but when the father disinherits the elder son in favor...
...SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH puts a grim new angle on the old triangle. Annette is a fragile doll of a woman who has had a critical heart disease for more than 13 years; in Meredith's phrase, she is "a dying something never dead." In death's slow embrace she remains beautiful and virginal, tended in the peaceful New England countryside by a dedicated aunt and a Negro cook. This sunnily funereal household is subsidized out of the thin pocketbook of Annette's husband James, who shares one room in New York with his mistress and dreams...
...lead-off story, The Adulterous Woman, might have been titled Death of a Salesman's Wife. Janine is a plumpish, childless French housewife in North Africa; for 25 years her marriage has been nourished on the bread-crumb rations of the need to be needed. Accompanying her salesman husband on a tour of his selling territory, Janine is struck by the stoic dignity of the Arabs, and by the cruel yet sensuous landscape. One night she steals out to the desert's edge to be laved by "the water of night ... in wave after wave, rising up even...