french

I beg your pardon, sir, said the Frenchman. I am not a coloniser.Well, let__ talk Algeria then. Let__ talk about your culture and your celebrated writers.

He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a horse at the same time.

Jean smirked, and delicately swirled the mic in his hands, careful not to make a sound. __ui. C__st normal. C'est pas spécial. I will give you something worthy of Holmes._ Jean set down the mic and proceeded toward the couple. As he approached them, he fiddled with his mustache for a moment, and then pulled it sharply. He winced at the sensation. __ have it,_ he declared confidently. __ou sir, are a thief.

Sunday lay so heavily in the air as to become almost nauseating. Maigret used to claim openly, half seriously, half in fun, that he had always had the knack of sensing a Sunday from his bed, without even having to open his eyes.

Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.

I said, __e parle français._ Indira gave me a weird look. Or a look that said I was weird. Whichever. The point is, I don__ really speak French, but it__ a useful phrase for confusing people you don__ wish to speak with. However, it__ apparently more useful in Europe, where no one enjoys speaking to the French.

Going through the customs dampened them further. Customs inspectors must have a mental twist that makes them suspicious of innocence. Dewy-eyed honeymooners, red-cheeked provincials, and helpless little old ladies lash them into frenzied investigation while slinking Orientals hugging small black bags are passed with scarcely a glance. George and Harriet stood under the letter ___ and watched reproachfully while a muttering little man flung their underclothes and dirty laundry right and left, leaving scattered heaps for them to put back in their suitcases.__ thought the French were supposed to be so polite,_ said Harriet indignantly.Maybe it can't be proven statistically, but it__ a safe bet that any given American on his or her first trip to France will at some point remark with indignation that he or she had thought the French were supposed to be so polite.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory _ this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.

What is the French word for rain? Le rain? La rain? Is the rain masculine or feminine? It__ such a bother that it must be masculine.

The very fact that a Frenchman was prepared, after tow minutes of conversation, to be so friendly towards anyone, especially one who had come from England, made me restless.

An old walrus-faced waiter attended to me; he had the knack of pouring the coffee and the hot milk from two jugs, held high in the air, and I found this entrancing, as if he were a child's magician. One day he said to me - he had some English - "Why are you sad?""I'm not sad," I said, and began to cry. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous."You should not be sad," he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. "It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later." The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. "It is criminal, the love," he said, patting my shoulder. "But none is worse.

That__ the key, you know, confidence. I know for a fact that if you genuinely like your body, so can others. It doesn__ really matter if it__ short, tall, fat or thin, it just matters that you can find some things to like about it. Even if that means having a good laugh at the bits of it that wobble independently, occasionally, that__ all right. It might take you a while to believe me on this one, lots of people don__ because they seem to suffer from self-hatred that precludes them from imagining that a big woman could ever love herself because they don__. But I do. I know what I__e got is a bit strange and difficult to love but those are the very aspects that I love the most! It__ a bit like people. I__e never been particularly attracted to the uniform of conventional beauty. I__ always a bit suspicious of people who feel compelled to conform. I personally like the adventure of difference. And what__ beauty, anyway?

I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.

In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature.

This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result was so cruel that one day, noticing a swelling over his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a tumor that would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with anything further, since it was this malady that was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed, at his period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle.

I should point out, creating one's own style, as much as is required to illustrate one of the aspects, the golden seam of language, involves beginning again at once, in a different manner, adopting the guise of a pupil when one risked becoming pedantic - thus by a shrugging of one's shoulders, disconcerting some with their genuflecting stance, and immortalizing oneself in multiple, impersonal, or even anonymous forms in response to the gesture of arms raised in stupefaction.

The physical shape of Mollies paralyses and contortions fit the pattern of late-nineteenth-century hysteria as well _ in particular the phases of "grand hysteria" described by Jean-Martin Charcot, a French physician who became world-famous in the 1870s and 1880s for his studies of hysterics...""The hooplike spasm Mollie experienced sounds uncannily like what Charcot considered the ultimate grand movement, the arc de de cercle (also called arc-en-ciel), in which the patient arched her back, balancing on her heels and the top of her head...""One of his star patients, known to her audiences only as Louise, was a specialist in the arc de cercle _ and had a background and hysterical manifestations quite similar to Mollie's. A small-town girl who made her way to Paris in her teens, Louise had had a disrupted childhood, replete with abandonment and sexual abuse.She entered Salpetriere in 1875, where while under Charcot's care she experienced partial paralysis and complete loss of sensation over the right side of her body, as well as a decrease in hearing, smell, taste, and vision. She had frequent violent, dramatic hysterical fits, alternating with hallucinations and trancelike phases during which she would "see" her mother and other people she knew standing before her (this symptom would manifest itself in Mollie). Although critics, at the time and since, have decried the sometime circus atmosphere of Charcot's lectures, and claimed that he, inadvertently or not, trained his patients how to be hysterical, he remains a key figure in understanding nineteenth-century hysteria.

One day I have a revelation. __ think we__e actually quite compatible,_ I tell him. __ou__e irritable, and I__ irritating.