Word: royed
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...affair. It is over in the first of nine scenes, and it begins just before the curtain drops. This is a clever conceit. Pinter, as we have much past reason to know, cannot write a wrong line-or a dull pause. The key actors, Raul Julia, Blythe Banner and Roy Scheider, are marvels of professional finesse, and Peter Hall's direction is ticktock perfect in its precision...
...Carnival in Romans Le Roy Ladurie provides a new aperture-and another compelling view. The place is the small city of Romans in southeastern France. The year is 1580. France is still recovering from the widespread slaughter of the Huguenots in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572; skirmishes still go on between Catholic and Huguenot. Town and countryside are periodically ravaged by roving bands of brigand soldiers. Class bitterness over increasingly burdensome taxes breaks out in tax strikes, urban unrest and peasant revolt. It all coils up toward Mardi Gras, culminating in a bloody midnight clash...
This is, as Le Roy Ladurie senses, the stuff of old drama with modern resonances. Yet Carnival in Romans is no mere clone of Montaillou: it is a more demanding work-a long day's journey into light. In that sense it is a braver book. The author dares, for example, to spend the entire second chapter talking about taxes. He cannot do otherwise. If sex and its avoidance preoccupied Montaillou, taxes and their avoidance seem to have preoccupied Romans and the countryside around...
...into action during the notables' masked ball at the city hall on the night before Mardi Gras. They spread through the streets, found Paumier at home, and shot him dead. During the early hours of Mardi Gras, the leaguers were driven from the town wall gatehouses. Tantalizingly, Le Roy Ladurie stops the action at each strategic point of battle to explain the sociology of the neighborhood and just why its capture was important...
...robe he liked to wear, the rebel leader remains a shadowy image, an unmeasured mix of guile, principle and erratic power. But Guerin's journal reveals the cunning, self-righteous man who rose to the nobility on the corpse of Paumier. "In the worst possible taste," notes Le Roy Ladurie, the unabashed judge chose as his coat of arms an uprooted apple tree - in French, a pommier...