In the foothills of the French Alps the narrator meets a shepherd who has quietly taken on the task of planting one hundred acorns a day in an effort to reforest his desolate region. Not even two world wars can keep the shepherd from continuing his solitary work. Gradually, this gentle, persistent man's work comes to fruition: the region is transformed; life and hope return; the world is renewed.

    Heartsnatcher is Boris Vian's most playful and most serious work. The main character is Clementine, a mother who punishes her husband for causing her the excruciating pain of giving birth to three babies. As they age, she becomes increasingly obsessed with protecting them, going so far as to build an invisible wall around their property.

    

    There are early letters imbued with the intensity of adolescent friendships; reports from the Orient that bring to life an exotic place where the picturesque, the sentimental, and the erotic gloriously coexist; and accounts of the writing of Madame Bovary that meticulously chronicle Flaubert's creative process. Letters to Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Ivan Turgenev, Emile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant offers a glimpse into nineteenth-century literary life; while those letters to George Sand bring to light a deep, abiding friendship. In the correspondence between Flaubert and his lover Louise Colet, Geoffrey Wall suggests in his Introduction, we witness an erotic game, a highly charged form of illicit intercourse.

    The author of The World Is Not Enough paints a vivid tale of chivalry, passion, and ruthlessness in 13th-century France, in the dramatic story of the struggle of the Medieval man for his soul, and of ultimate self-sacrifice for spiritual goals.

    

    This new edition, of one of the classics of the Pelican History of Art series, has been revised and updated with color illustrations and a new bibliography.

    Looking at writers and painters as well as historic figures who have left their mark on the Seine, Gibbings presents an affectionate picture of this great river and the people who live and work on its banks.

    Jean-Marie buys some tiny shoes for him and there is a happy Christmas for all. Charming pictures in yellow, black & white and in full color.

    Here are drama and suspense, treachery and heroism, gory battle and broad humor, love pure and impure, against the background of feudal France and Moorish Spain.The two poles between which lies most of the action are the treachery of Ganelon that sends Roland and his twenty thousand vassals to their death, on the field at Rencevals, and the trial by combat that pits Thierry as the emperor Charlemagne's champion against the redoubtable Pinabel, champion of the traitor.