You don't want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the prese...nt tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don't want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a ...flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in th...e slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack ... to the feast, from the conversation at the local café to the speech at a formal dinnerLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But compared with the task of selecting a piece of French pastry held by an impatient waiter a move in chess is like reaching for ...a salary check in its demand on the contemplative faculties.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This has been illustrated copiously each day with photographs taken by the author, reproduced by means of cuts such as only French... newspaper-engravers can make, presumably etched on pieces of bread.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sad...e. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and ...crooked as individuals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous a...nd idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of "la patrie" he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In those hours when history becomes terrible, it is as if the soul of woman seizes the moment and tries to set an example for the ...soul of man ... the soul of the French woman is really a heroic blend of family and homeland.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »