french-history

The French by their nature had a permanent hunger for sensation. This was even more true of the eighteenth century, of which that considerable expert Victor du Bled remarked that no other age was ever so bored.

If you spent time thinking about the future, you wouldn't be a true adventurer. An adventure is something that happens from one moment to the next; in which there is no yesterday and no tomorrow. Everything else is just petty bourgeois.

It is not the business of a Queen to be human.

I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortiferous power: certain Communards paid with their lives for their willingness or even their eagerness to pose on the barricades: defeated, they were recognized by Thiers's police and shot, almost every one).

When Hitler marched across the RhineTo take the land of France,La dame de fer decided,__et__ make the tyrant dance.__et him take the land and city,The hills and every flower,One thing he will never have,The elegant Eiffel Tower.The French cut the cables,The elevators stood still,__f he wants to reach the top,Let him walk it, if he will.__he invaders hung a swastikaThe largest ever seen.But a fresh breeze blewAnd away it flew,Never more to be seen.They hung up a second mark,Smaller than the first,But a patriot climbedWith a thought in mind:__ever your duty shirk.__p the iron ladyHe stealthily made his way,Hanging the bright tricolour,He heroically saved the day.Then, for some strange reason,A mystery to this day,Hitler never climbed the tower,On the ground he had to stay.At last he ordered she be razedDown to a twisted pile.A futile attack, for still she standsBeaming her metallic smile.

I turn away from the smell of death, pressing my lavender scented handkerchief as tight as I can against my nose.

After a time I saw what I believed, at the time, to be a radio relay station located out on a desolate sand spit near Villa Bens. It was only later that I found out that it was Castelo de Tarfaya, a small fortification on the North African coast. Tarfaya was occupied by the British in 1882, when they established a trading post, called Casa del Mar. It is now considered the Southern part of Morocco. In the early _20s, the French pioneering aviation company, Aéropostale, built a landing strip in this desert, for its mail delivery service. By 1925 their route was extended to Dakar, where the mail was transferred onto steam ships bound for Brazil. A monument now stands in Tarfaya, to honor the air carrier and its pilots as well as the French aviator and author Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry better known as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. As a newly acclaimed author in the literary world. __ight Flight,_ or __ol de nuit,_ was the first of Saint-Exupéry__ literary works and won him the prix Femina, a French literary prize created in 1904. The novel was based on his experiences as an early mail pilot and the director of the __eroposta Argentina airline,_ in South America. Antoine is also known for his narrative __he Little Prince_ and his aviation writings, including the lyrical 1939 __ind, Sand and Stars_ which is Saint-Exupéry__ 1939, memoir of his experiences as a postal pilot. It tells how on the week following Christmas in 1935, he and his mechanic amazingly survived a crash in the Sahara desert. The two men suffered dehydration in the extreme desert heat before a local Bedouin, riding his camel, discovered them __ust in the nick of time,_ to save their lives. His biographies divulge numerous affairs, most notably with the Frenchwoman Hélène de Vogüé, known as __elly_ and referred to as __adame de B.