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My mother was a Chinese trapeze artist in pre-war Paris
Smuggling bombs for the underground.
And she met my father at a fete in Aix-en-Provence;
He was disguised as a Russian cadet in the employ of the Axis.
--
My Mother was a Chinese Trapeze Artist (5 Songs - 2001)

 

Colin Meloy

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Through the air on the flying trapeze, his mind hummed. Amusing it was, astoundingly funny. A trapeze to God, or to nothing, a flying trapeze to some sort of eternity; he prayed objectively for strength to make the flight with grace.

 

William Saroyan

 

Other children had fathers and mothers and honored them, and they prospered and lived to a ripe old age; but he was often bitter towards his father and mother and dishonored them in his heart. His mother had cuckolded his father, and his father had betrayed his mother, and both of them had betrayed the boy. The only consolation was that he had a Father in heaven. And yet—it would have been better to have a father on earth.

 

Halldor Laxness

 

Geraldine: I've no idea who my father was.
Prentice: I'd better be frank, Miss Barclay. I can't employ you if you're in any way miraculous. It would be contrary to established practice. You did have a father?
Geraldine: Oh, I'm sure I did. My mother was frugal in her habits, but she'd never economize unwisely.

 

Joe Orton

 

If Russian painters were condemned to become the pupils of the West they were, I think, rather unfaithful ones by their very nature. The best Russian realist conflicts with the realism of Courbet. The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves on perplexed if one compares it with Monet and Pisarro. Here, in the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet and others, I understood why my alliance with Russia and Russian art did not take root. Why my language itself is foreign to them. Why people do not place confidence in me. Why the artistic circles fail to recognize me. Why in Russia I am entirely useless.. ..In Paris, it seemed to me that I was discovering everything, above all a mastery of technique.. ..It was not in technique alone that I sought the meaning of art then. It was as if the gods had stood before me.. ..I had the impression that we are still only roaming on the surface of matter, that we are afraid to plunge into chaos, to shatter and overthrow beneath our feet the familiar surface. (on his arrival in Paris in 1910, fh)

 

Marc Chagall

 

And the city was lovely, highly ornamented, like Paris, and untouched by war. It was supposedly an “open” city, not to be attacked since there were no troop concentrations or war industries there. But high explosives were dropped on Dresden by American and British planes on the night of February 13, 1945, just about twenty-one years ago, as I now write. There were no particular targets for the bombs. The hope was that they would create a lot of kindling and drive firemen underground. And then tens of thousands of tiny incendiaries were scattered over the kindling, like seeds on freshly turned loam. More bombs were dropped to keep firemen in their holes, and all the little fires grew, joined one another, became one apocalyptic flame. Hey presto: fire storm. It was the largest massacre in European history, by the way. (...) Everything was gone but the cellars where 135'000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men.

 

Kurt Vonnegut