Word: mirabeau
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Dates: during 1964-1964
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...rich aristocratic rightist, decides to hold a wig party in a Gothic catacomb of a cellar. All his guests are to come as leading figures of the Revolution. Maxime himself plays Saint-Just. Other friends play Danton, Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI ("virtually a nonspeaking role") and the Comte de Mirabeau. The butt of the party is to be Bitos (Donald Pleasence), the local deputy prosecutor, an ex-classmate of Maxime's and the son of a washerwoman. He comes as Robespierre...
...history takes stage center as Bitos actually becomes Robespierre. There are tableaux of the boy being caned by a Jesuit schoolmaster for his stiff-necked pride, of Robespierre as a humorless young parliamentary Stalin outraging the more moderate Mirabeau ("You've taught me a very sad thing, which is that the Revolution could be a bore"), of Robespierre dictating new decrees of death in a last mad spasm of guillotine-hungry power...
Full Stocking. France's monumental diplomatist of the 19th century was Talleyrand, who, said Mirabeau, would sell his soul for money, "and he would be right, for he would be exchanging dung for gold." Where Richelieu spoke for a powerful and united France, Talleyrand's 19th century role was most often like De Gaulle's: to make the world pay heed to a beaten, broken France. Superbly confident, cool under the worst conditions, Talleyrand once sat calmly through an hour-long tirade by Napoleon Bonaparte and heard himself called everything from a liar and a traitor...
Parted Lips. Though he was well-steeped in the classical tradition of sculpture that ennobles the sitter's profile, Houdon was incapable of flattery. He did not spare the pockmarks on the face of French Revolutionary Mirabeau, or embellish the vapid looks of the young Lafayette, or face-lift the homely dewlap of Ben Franklin. The result is that the popular likenesses today of some of the greatest men of the revolutionary periods in France and America started with the passionately accurate chisel of Houdon. Now on view at Massachusetts' Worcester Art Museum...