A Tale of Two Murders: Passion and Power in Seventeenth-Century France.
James R. Farr. A Tale of Two Murders: Passion and Power in Seventeenth-Century France. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. xiv + 226 pp. index. illus. map. $21.95. ISBN: 0-8223-3471-2. On a warm September evening in 1638, Dijon nobleman Pierre Baillet and his valet Philibert Neugot...

Les Dictionnaires Larousse: genese et evolution.
Les Dictionnaires Larousse: genese et evolution. Ed. by MONIQUE C. CORMIER and ALINE FRANCOEUR. (Parametres) Quebec: Presses de l'Universite de Montreal. 2005. 330 pp. $24.95. ISBN 2-7606-1991-5. First of all, the title is misleading; as Monique Cormier says in her introduction, the occasion for the volume is...

A Tale of Two Murders: Passion and Power in Seventeenth-Century France.
A Tale of Two Murders: Passion and Power in Seventeenth-Century France, by James R. Farr. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2005. xi, 225 pp. $74.95 US (cloth), $21.95 US (paper). Murder! Lust! Deception! James R. Farr's A Tale of Two Murders: Passion and Power in Seventeenth-Century...

Taize disputes claim founder 'converted' to Catholicism.
The Taize community in eastern France has denied claims reported in the French newspaper Le Monde that its Swiss-born Protestant founder, Brother Roger Schutz, who died last year, had made a secret conversion to Roman Catholicism. "This article gave credence to and reproduced the claims of a...

The final take: Music Karina Cauvin can't live without.
SOPRANO KARINA GAUVIN CONTINUES HER BUSY CAREER ON BOTH SIDES OF the Atlantic. This summer and fall, there's lots of Mozart, in Chicago (June) as well as at the Elora and Lanaudiere festivals in Canada (July). In between these, at the end of June, Gauvin opens the festival in...

A letter from Taize: Brother Roger's funeral.
JUST A POSTCARD from Europe, in the midst of my travels, to share a remarkable experience. On Aug. 23, I was one of more than 10,000 people who attended the funeral of Brother Roger at Taize in Burgundy. How horrified I had been, just a week earlier,...

'Twas brillig ...: million dollar excuses, Dutch psychic caught cheating, Sylvia Browne and the Virginia Miners, From the JREF Museum.
Million Dollar Excuses Every week or so, I'm offered ingenious rationalizations from or on behalf of applicants for the $1 million JREF prize (www.randi.org /research/index.html) who have failed their tests. The spectrum of alibis is wide: the room was too warm, Jupiter was in Sagittarius, I ingested...

For the ladies.
FOR SOME, IT MAY BE HARD TO IMAGINE: The company that made plastic watches a household name is now rolling out a high-end luxury watch and jewelry collection that bears the name of one of the 20th century's most respected watch and jewelry makers. But that's precisely what Swatch...

Sticks and stones: building a medieval castle.
Before You Read Ask students: What does a medieval castle look like? When were such castles built? Why might someone want to build a medieval castle today? Vocabulary archaeology: the study of material evidence to find out about human cultures of the past...

Soiree Beaujolais.
aStupid me! Before I attended a big party at the NBC tent last week, admittedly, the only thing I knew of the French were French toasts, French Fries, French poodles, and French kisses ! ! ! Thank God, I attended the Soiree Beaujolais 2005 affair,...