Gulbenkian's motto was " Only the best ", and hence the museum has masterpieces by western European artists as Domenico Ghirlandaio, Rubens, Rembrandt, Rodin, Carpeaux, Houdon, Renoir, Dierick Bouts, Vittore Carpaccio, Cima da Conegliano, Van Dyck, Corot, Degas, Nattier, George Romney, Stefan Lochner, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Claude Monet, Jean-François Millet, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Thomas Gainsborough, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Giovanni Battista Moroni, Frans Hals, Ruisdael, Boucher, Largillière, Andrea della Robbia, Pisanello, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, Antonio Rosselino, André-Charles Boulle, Cressent, Oeben, Riesener, Antoine-Sébastien Durand, Charles Spire, Jean Deforges, François-Thomas Germain, and many others.

Régine Deforges ( born 15 August 1935 ) is a French author, editor, director, and playwright.

Deforges lives in Paris.

* La Bicyclette Bleue ( The Blue Bicycle ) by Régine Deforges becomes France's best selling novel ever.

* La Mort propagande, R. Deforges, Paris, 1977

* La Mort propagande: et autres textes de jeunesse, R. Deforges, Paris, 1991

But her prettiness was what he had noticed first, and all the other things had come afterward: cruelty, meanness, self-will.

There was an artificial lake just out of sight in the first stand of trees, fed by a half dozen springs that popped out of the ground above the hillside orchard.

The first part of the road was steep, but it leveled off after the second bend and curled gradually into the valley.

No one was behind it, but in the rear wall of the office I noticed, for the first time, a door which had been left partially open.

The herd was watered and then thrown onto a broad grass flat which was to be the first night's bedground.

Once again, Tom Horn was the first and most likely suspect, and he was brought in for questioning immediately.

For Matilda, it was the first she had known in many a night.

Even the knowledge that she was losing another boy, as a mother always does when a marriage is made, did not prevent her from having the first carefree, dreamless sleep that she had known since they dropped down the canyon and into Bear Valley, way, way back there when they were crossing those other mountains.

Stevens was grunting over the last empty pocket when Russ abruptly rose and lunged toward Carmer's hat, which had tumbled half-a-dozen feet away when he first fell.

The Indian's arm whipped sidewise -- there was a flash of amber and froth, the crash of the bottle shattering against the side of the first car.

It was her first smile.

At first, I thought he was out of his head, talking wildly like this.

Hell, I gave him the first decent job he ever had, six, seven -- how many years ago was it, Rob ''??

Miss Langford ( her first name was Evelyn ) was an attractive girl.

School began in August, the hottest part of the year, and for the first few days Miss Langford was very lenient with the children, letting them play a lot and the new ones sort of get acquainted with one another.

It was just as well that the ignorant Dandy enjoyed himself to the hilt that first evening, for the room was to become his prison cell.

`` Bastards '', he would say, `` all I did was put a beat to that Vivaldi stuff, and the first chair clobbered me ''!!

In 1961 the first important legislative victory of the Kennedy Administration came when the principle of national responsibility for local economic distress won out over a `` state's-responsibility '' proposal -- provision was made for payment for unemployment relief by nation-wide taxation rather than by a levy only on those states afflicted with manpower surplus.

The first systematic thinking about this Pandora's box within Pandora's boxes was done four years ago by Fred Ikle, a frail, meek-mannered Swiss-born sociologist.

The smell at first was more surprising than unpleasant.

His collaboration with Washington, begun when he was the general's aide during the Revolution, was resumed when he entered the first Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury.

When they were closer and he saw that one was a woman, he was more puzzled than ever.

My new Aunt was perhaps three or four years older than I and it had been a long time since I had seen as gorgeous a woman who oozed sex.

I myself was fond of him but what a young woman half his age saw in him was a mystery to me.

Mary Jane might not be the most intelligent woman, but she was one of the most determined.

His bold eyes raked the woman, and a perceptive spectator might sense that there was more to their relationship than that of slave to owner.

Though the slave's dying words about the woman troubled the coroner's panel, Dandy's accusation was adjudged an aberration by the jury and disregarded.

One beatnik got the woman he was living with so involved in drugs and self-analysis and all-night sessions of sex that she was beginning to crack up.

This showed that common sense had not died out at the county and village level -- though why the unhappy and obviously unbalanced woman was not restrained remains a puzzle.

I fled, however, not from what might have been the natural fear of being unable to disguise from you that the things about my bridegroom -- in the sense you meant the word `` things '' -- which you had been galvanizing yourself to tell me as a painful part of your maternal duty were things which I had already insisted upon finding out for myself ( despite, I may now say, the unspeakable awkwardness of making the discovery on principle, yes, on principle, and in cold blood ) because I was resolved, as a modern woman, not to be a mollycoddle waiting for Life but to seize Life by the throat.

That she was affected by his protestations seems obvious, but since she was evidently a sensible young woman -- as well as an outgoing and sympathetic type -- it would seem that for her the word friendship had a far less intense emotional significance than that which Thompson gave it.

Soon he was in trouble there, for defending a woman who was accused of smiling in church.

He advised the poor woman not to appear in court as what she was charged with was not in violation of law.

While driving the cow back home the woman was assaulted by a servant maid of Gorton.

Tessie, everybody thought, was a strong woman, but she was only strong because she had Alfred to lean on.

Her brother Karl was a very gentle soul, her mother was a quiet woman who said little but who had hard, probing eyes.

He thought how this dainty, fragile older woman threading her way through the streets of Westminster on a day in June, enjoying the flowers in the shops, the greetings from old friends, but never really drawing a deep, passionate breath, was so like himself.

The only one who would have him was his cripple, the strange unhappy woman who became his wife.