There's many a slip twixt cup and
lip
(trad)
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2230
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There's many a slip twixt the cup
and lip.? This was first said some eighty
odd years ago in Paris, a very gay city in those days.? It was the time of the great painting
movement called the impressionists school.
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The leader of the school, almost
the founder of the impressionists , was a painter called Edouard Manet.
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Now Manet had painted his newest
picture, Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, and this was a very interesting picture of
some gentlemen and some girls having breakfast on the grass at a place in the
Bois de Boulogne.
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It's rather an unpleasant sort of
glenn. On one side, though you can't see it in the picture is an ornamental
sort of goldfish pond with a lot of carp in it. On the other side there's a big
tall grotto which was a sort of lover's leap.?
And lovers always leaping off this thing to their doom.
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Manet had painted this picture of
all the people in the middle and was hanging it and was giving a show THAT very
afternoon.
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All the Parisian painters were
there, there was Toulouse-Lautrec, conspicuous by his absinthe. There was Monet
and there were the famous writers Emile Zola and his beautiful wife Gorgon.
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The picture was unveiled with
something of a flourish by Edourd Manet.?
And public didn't like it at all. The people in the gallery absolutely
hated it.
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There was the cry of "Manet
is the root of all evil."
They hated the man.
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And when they looked around,
Edouard Manet had completely disappeared.?
Monet and the others were terribly worried and thought what had
happened. He's done away with himself.?
Then they suddenly remembered this picture, Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, and
the lover's leap.? And they thought he's
either leapt from the lover's leap or drowned himself in the carp pool
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They all ran to the Bois de
Boulogne.? One looking in that direction
and the other looking in the other direction, and suddenly, I think it was Zola
said, "Don't worry all is well. There's Manet asleep twixt the carp and
the leaf."
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Frank Muir 580702a
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