One is a sumptuously French essay built entirely in limestone, the other a subdued Georgian-style brick residence.
In a French essay, a 17-year-old Einstein writes that while a happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future, "young people especially like to contemplate bold projects".
Rest assured that when the French see us walk up to the front of our classrooms and intone the familiar explanation, "An essay … from the French essai … meaning 'attempt' " (as I have watched professors do, as I have done in turn before students), ruthless Gallic laughter is occurring on some level.
He began his first work, written in French, Essai sur l'étude de la littérature (1761; An Essay on the Study of Literature, 1764).
Nimier and several other cohorts were the subject of one of the most famous modern French literary essays, by Bernard Frank, published in Sartre's Les Temps Modernes in 1952, that defined a new, flashy, rightist school, the Hussars (borrowing the title of Nimier's novel "The Blue Hussar").
On a scale of one to five, he said, my French practice essay was worth a one.
Campbell's work includes a 54-minute film featuring segments of a 1953 French film essay by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais on colonialism and African art, plus a dance routine choreographed by Michael Clark that interprets economic equations from Karl Marx's Das Kapital.
The predictability of most of the jokes none the less went down well with the under-12s, and the many anti-Gallic jibes satisfied their parents, despite the appalling French accent essayed by long-time Paris resident John Malkovich (I'd hate to hear him speak real French).
The highbrow literary equivalent of bullshit might be the "essay," with its French etymology in "essai," or, to try.
