person
Léon Gambetta
Gambetta
also: Гамбетта
French republican statesman and orator, a dominant figure of the early Third Republic who died on 31 December 1882; his death was fresh newspaper news when this sketch appeared.
Reading notes
- Two in One §8 Gambetta
Léon Gambetta, the French republican statesman and orator who had died on 31 December 1882 (a few days before this story appeared); his sudden death was fresh newspaper matter, which is how the timid clerk comes to be pronouncing on it.
- The Anniversary §17 Quite the Gambetta
Khirin's sneering aside compares Shipuchin's self-important report-writing to Léon Gambetta, the celebrated French republican orator and statesman (d. 1882) -- a stock reference-point for grandiloquent oratory in Russian usage of the period, deployed here purely as mockery of Shipuchin's inflated sense of his own report.