Word: melun
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...finds distasteful. Last week every Frenchman with an infelicitous name seemed to be protesting the case of Gérard and Paulette Tro-gnon, a middle-class couple from the town of Le Mée-sur-Seine southeast of Paris. Recently a three-judge court in nearby Melun ruled that the Trognons could not bestow their name on their three-year-old foster son Philippe. The court did not object to the couple but only to their surname, which means stump or butt end. A name like that, said Chief Judge Maurice Rousseau, would be "un handicap" that would...
French courts rarely attempt to force a name change-evidently with reason. The Trognons, who are appealing the Melun decision, have become a cause celebre, rather than a butt of jokes. Gérard Trognon refuses to let Philippe keep his original surname. "How," he asks, "will he be able to answer the teasers who say he is not his father's son because of a different name?" Similarly Paulette stalwartly refuses to give up her married name; she loves to call Gérard "mon petit Trognon" at intimate moments. The couple has received letters of support from...
...such beautiful work that when he came to trial, all hands agreed that even in France, where 80% of the world's fake currency is produced, Bojarsky deserved the title "the Leonardo da Vinci of Forgers." Almost regretfully, police packed him off to La Prison Centrale in Melun last week to begin serving a 20-year term. But, sighed Emile Benamou, director of France's National Center for the Repression of Forgers, and the man who spent 13 years tracking down Bojarsky, "His qualities as an artist are marvelous. Had it been dollars that he was making...
...escape the misery of his own backward land, where full-time jobs are scarce and wage scales a fraction of those in France. Since 1959, nearly 150,000 peasants have emigrated to France-most of them illegally. The majority live in squalor in such growing slum areas as the Melun shantytown on the outskirts of Paris. Faithfully, they send large parts of their paychecks home: last year their remittances added nearly $40 million to Dictator Antonio Salazar's economy...
What was the purpose of this dramatic but curiously clandestine meeting, just 48 hours before De Gaulle took off on his long-heralded visit to Mexico? The men are not close friends. In fact, the meeting at Melun was the first time De Gaulle had laid eyes on Ben Bella since World War II in Italy, when le grand Charles had pinned a military medal on Ben Bella, then an obscure master sergeant in the Free French forces...