Once I had to use actual force to prevent him from buying a phaeton at a price of seven hundred francs, after a vehicle had caught his fancy in the Palais Royal as seeming to be a desirable present for Blanche. What could SHE have done with a seven-hundred-franc phaeton?--and the General possessed in the world but a thousand francs!
As for what view the General took of myself, I think that he never divined the footing on which I stood with Blanche. True, he had heard, in a dim sort of way, that I had won a good deal of money; but more probably he supposed me to be acting as secretary--or even as a kind of servant--to his inamorata.
It was now clear to me that Blanche and he were on the point of coming to terms; yet, true to my usual custom, I said nothing.
Blanche herself tied his tie, and Blanche herself pomaded him-- with the result that, in his frockcoat and white waistcoat, he looked quite comme il faut.
"Il est, pourtant, TRES comme il faut," Blanche remarked when she issued from his room, as though the idea that he was "TRES comme il faut " had impressed even her.
At length the time had come for us to part, and Blanche, the egregious Blanche, shed real tears as she took her leave of me.
Now available for the first time on CD, A Streetcar Named Desire is the full-cast archival recording of the famous musical by Tennessee Williams, as performed by the cast at the 1973 revival at Lincoln Center (including Pulitzer Prize-winning stars Rosemary Harris and James Farentino as
Blanche and Stanley).
For one,
Blanche Richardson, an extraordinary writer and editor--as natural and skilled an editor as Michael Jordan is a basketball player--had so much to share with the eager retreat participants that one evening at my third announcement to her editing workshop that it was time for dinner, I found
Blanche lecturing away in the fading last light of first dark and the participants all scribbling away on pads they could barely see.
But in practice, the alchemy of Armagnac is a blending of Gascogny grapes: Folle
Blanche, Ugni
Blanche, Colombard, and Baco 22A, followed by a patented, single distillation and aging (most likely invented by the Moors).