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“... Ababa (its construction was managed by his most trusted foreign adviser, a Swiss engineer named Alfred Ilg). Americans, Russians, Italians and even Arthur Rimbaud, the poet turned arms dealer, came to do business with the king of Shoa. There had been Italians in Ethiopia from much earlier, mainly missionaries like Father (later Cardinal) Guglielmo ...”

“... the only one of Alice’s daughters still living at home, wanted to marry Pierre Sisley (son of Alfred, and therefore a boy Monet had known from birth), Monet and Alice forbade it. Pierre, ‘a painter even less successful than his father’, was regarded by them as little more than a charity case. Not that this attitude had made their own sons – Monet ...”

“... in. Le Roy Ladurie, head of the Worms bank, was a notable contributor, but the Verre, BNCI and Dreyfus banks chipped in, as did Rothschilds, Lazard Frères, the Banque de I’ Indo-chine, all manner of employers’ associations and business pressure groups, the De Wendel empire, the Comité des Forges, Rhône Poulenc, Mazda Lamps, and so on. All this money ...”

“... was ‘no more than a memory’ at home. Still, as a Jew born in 1908, he felt the impact of the Dreyfus Affair. In a series of interviews conducted with Didier Eribon in the late 1980s and collected in De près et de loin, he spoke of being bullied at school, and of his embattled sense of difference as a member of a national community that didn’t fully ...”