antechamber

It was January 1998 and Robert Bourgi was waiting to see the Gabonese president Omar Bongo, in an antechamber at his seaside palace in Libreville.

Who should then be ushered into the same antechamber but Roland Dumas, former French foreign minister and right-hand man of ruling Socialist President François Mitterrand, Chirac’s arch-rival.

Most of those banished from Paris won’t qualify for permanent housing in their new locations, and as for asylum status, one lawyer in France calls the busing program “an antechamber to deportation.”

The larynx functions like an antechamber to the windpipe, or trachea, with a flap of tissue called the epiglottis keeping food and drink from falling down the windpipe.

Pagano delights in revealing how the document survived: When Napoleon Bonaparte famously seized the Vatican archives in 1810 and carted them off to Paris, Pagano’s predecessor as chief archivist rolled up the 1530 letter and hid it inside a secret drawer in a chair in the archive antechamber.