conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about Bernard, Olivier\'s, Edouard entitled The Counterfeiters.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Counterfeiters (novel): The plot revolves around Bernard – a schoolfriend of Olivier\'s who is preparing for his bac – discovering he is a bastard and taking this as a welcome pretext for running away from home.\nHe spends a night in Olivier\'s bed (where Olivier describes a recent visit to a prostitute and how he did not find the experience very enjoyable).\nAfter Bernard steals the suitcase belonging to Edouard, Olivier\'s uncle, and the ensuing complications, he is made Edouard\'s secretary.\nOlivier is jealous and ends up in the hands of the cynical and downright diabolical Comte de Passavant, who travels with him to the Mediterranean.\nEventually, Bernard and Edouard decide they do not fit as well together as anticipated, and Bernard leaves to take a job at a school, then finally decides to return to his father\'s home.\nOlivier is now made Edouard\'s secretary, and after an eventful evening on which he embarrasses himself grossly, Olivier ends up in bed together with Edouard, finally fulfilling the attraction they have felt for each other all along but were unable to express.\nOther plotlines are woven around these elements, such as Olivier\'s younger brother Georges and his involvement with a ring of counterfeiters, or his older brother Vincent and his relationship with Laura, a married woman, with whom he has a child.\nPerhaps the most suspenseful scene in the book revolves around Boris, another illegitimate child and the grandson of La Pérouse, who commits suicide in front of the assembled class when dared by Ghéridanisol, another of Passavant\'s cohorts.\nIn some regards, such as the way in which the adolescents act and speak in a way beyond their years and the incompetence of the adults (especially the fathers), as well as its motives of developing and confused adolescent sexuality, the novel has common ground with Frank Wedekind\'s (at the time scandalous) 1891 drama Spring Awakening.\nThe Counterfeiters also shares with that play the vision of homosexual relationships as under certain conditions being "better" than heterosexual ones, with the latter ones leading inevitably to destructive outcomes in both works.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about Nazis, German, Monte entitled The Counterfeiters.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Counterfeiters (2007 film): The film begins shortly after the end of the Second World War, with a German man arriving in Monte Carlo.\nAfter checking into an expensive hotel and paying with cash, he takes in the high life of Monte Carlo, successfully gambling in a casino and attracting the attention of a beautiful French woman.\nLater, she discovers tattooed numerals on his arm, revealing him as a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps.\nThe film then shifts to Berlin in 1936, where the man, Salomon Sorowitsch, is revealed as a successful forger of currency and passports.\nCaught by the police, he is imprisoned, first in a labour camp, then in Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz.\nIn an effort to secure himself protection and meagre comforts at the camp, he turns his forging skills to portraiture, attracting the attention of the guards, who commission him to paint them and their families in exchange for extra food rations.\nSorowitsch's talents bring him to wider attention, and he is transferred out of the concentration camp.\nBrought in front of the police officer who arrested him in Berlin, he finds himself put together with other prisoners with artistic or printing talents, and begins working in a special section of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp devoted to forgery.\nThe counterfeiters are kept in relatively humane conditions, with comfortable bunks, a washroom and adequate food, although they are subjected to brutality and insults at the hands of the prison guards.\nHis fellow prisoners have a range of backgrounds from Jewish bank managers to political agitators, and while some are content to work for the Nazis to avoid the extermination camps, others see their efforts as supporting the German war effort.\nAt first, self-preservation appears to guide Sorowitsch, but his motives for forging for the Nazis are complicated by his growing concern for his fellow prisoners, his awareness of their role in the wider war against the Nazis, and his professional pride in counterfeiting the US dollar, a currency he was previously unable to forge.\nSorowitsch juggles the demands for progress of the Nazi authorities, his co-counterfeiters' determination to sabotage the operation, and his loyalties to his fellow prisoners.\nThe prisoners successfully counterfeit the British pound but intentionally delay the forgery of the US dollar.\nGradually, slivers of evidence that the war has turned decidedly against the Nazis arrive.\nOne day the camp guards suddenly announce that the printing machines are to be dismantled and shipped away, which leads the counterfeiters to fear that they will finally be killed.\nBefore anything happens to them, the German guards flee the camp in advance of the Red Army.\nStarving prisoners from other parts of the camp, armed with confiscated weapons, take over and break into the compound where the counterfeiters had been held in relative luxury.\nUntil the insurrectionists see the well-fed printers' prison tattoos, they believe them to be SS officers and threaten to shoot them.\nThe counterfeiters then must account for their forging actions to the half-dead prisoners.\nThe film then returns to Monte Carlo where Sorowitsch, apparently disgusted by the life he is now leading on the currency that he forged for the Nazis, intentionally gambles it all away.\nSitting alone afterward on the beach, he is joined by the French woman, concerned after his seemingly disastrous losses at the table.\nDancing slowly together on the beach, she consoles him regarding all the money he has lost, to which he replies, laughing, that we can always make more.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Counterfeiters
  The counterfeit coins were manufactured in Spain, introduced into France, and brought by three professional criminals: Djl, Monnet, and Tornet. They were delivered to the middlemen Fichat, Micornet, and Armanet and sold by them for 2 fr. 50 each to the youths who were to pass them.
  These latter were bohemians, second-year students, unemployed journalists, artists, novelists, etc. But there was in addition a certain number of young students from the École des Beaux-Arts, several sons of public officials, the son of a provincial magistrate, and a minor employee of the Ministry of Finance.
  If for some of them this criminal trade was a means of leading a "high life" beyond that permitted by their family allowance, for others—at least according to them—it was a humanitarian work: "Once in a while I would give a few to poor devils with money troubles who could use them to keep their families alive.... And nobody was harmed, because we were stealing from nobody but the State."
  SUICIDE OF A SCHOOLBOY: We have noted the dramatic suicide of young Nény, barely fifteen years old, who, in the middle of a class at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal at Clermont-Ferrand, blew out his brains with a revolver.
  On Sunday afternoon at Madame X—'s they said I was "hesitant," but how can I know, even yet, what to do or say? So there you have it. I should like you to advise me, and tell me what you think of this frightful business.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: These latter were bohemians, second-year students, unemployed journalists, artists, novelists, etc. But there was in addition a certain number of young students from the École des Beaux-Arts, several sons of public officials, the son of a provincial magistrate, and a minor employee of the Ministry of Finance.
  If for some of them this criminal trade was a means of leading a "high life" beyond that permitted by their family allowance, for others—at least according to them—it was a humanitarian work: "Once in a while I would give a few to poor devils with money troubles who could use them to keep their families alive.... And nobody was harmed, because we were stealing from nobody but the State."
  SUICIDE OF A SCHOOLBOY: We have noted the dramatic suicide of young Nény, barely fifteen years old, who, in the middle of a class at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal at Clermont-Ferrand, blew out his brains with a revolver.
  On Sunday afternoon at Madame X—'s they said I was "hesitant," but how can I know, even yet, what to do or say? So there you have it. I should like you to advise me, and tell me what you think of this frightful business.
  I am grateful that you have called my attention to this astonishing passage in Saint-Simon. I blushingly confess that I did not yet know it, and I have found the greatest pleasure in reading it in a copy lent me by Monsieur Hanotaux, a neighbor of the friends I am staying with here in the country.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I told him that since I had got out of the service I was less interested in attachments than in freedom.
  He opened a little low sideboard, but he had no sooner taken out the cocktail glasses and a variety of bottles than the doorbell rang....
  Basically Édouard doesn't know me any better than I know him. When he asked me if I had a mistress, I almost told him that I dread nothing so much as that kind of an attachment; but it's better not to be too revealing. I have a horror of speaking of myself; this comes not only from my lack of interest in myself, but mainly because, as soon as I make any statement about myself, the opposite immediately appears much more true. Thus I was about to write that I have a taste for sensual pleasure, but at the same time I have to admit that love bores me. And immediately the thought strikes me that what I find boring in love is the sentiment, the pleasure long deferred, the petty attentions, the simpering ways, the declarations, the sworn oaths.... Amorous, though, I am at all times, and of everyone and everything. To be amorous of only one—that I shouldn't like.
  This need I have to be on the move, to offer myself, the need that supplies the most abundant springs of my happiness and continually causes me to prefer someone else to myself, is, after all, possibly only a necessity for escaping myself, for losing myself, for butting in and sampling the lives of others. Enough talk of myself. Without Édouard I should never have said so much.
  ANDRÉ GIDE was born in Paris in 1869. His first literary works (he began publishing in 1891) established him as a promising addition to the symbolist group; but in 1895, after a voyage of self-discovery in North Africa, he turned to the glorification of life and liberty in works close to the spirit of Nietzsche and Whitman. With Paris and his Norman estate as headquarters, Gide spent much of his long life traveling throughout Europe and Africa while devoting himself to literary creation.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I told him that since I had got out of the service I was less interested in attachments than in freedom.
  He opened a little low sideboard, but he had no sooner taken out the cocktail glasses and a variety of bottles than the doorbell rang....
  Basically Édouard doesn't know me any better than I know him. When he asked me if I had a mistress, I almost told him that I dread nothing so much as that kind of an attachment; but it's better not to be too revealing. I have a horror of speaking of myself; this comes not only from my lack of interest in myself, but mainly because, as soon as I make any statement about myself, the opposite immediately appears much more true. Thus I was about to write that I have a taste for sensual pleasure, but at the same time I have to admit that love bores me. And immediately the thought strikes me that what I find boring in love is the sentiment, the pleasure long deferred, the petty attentions, the simpering ways, the declarations, the sworn oaths.... Amorous, though, I am at all times, and of everyone and everything. To be amorous of only one—that I shouldn't like.
  This need I have to be on the move, to offer myself, the need that supplies the most abundant springs of my happiness and continually causes me to prefer someone else to myself, is, after all, possibly only a necessity for escaping myself, for losing myself, for butting in and sampling the lives of others. Enough talk of myself. Without Édouard I should never have said so much.
  ANDRÉ GIDE was born in Paris in 1869. His first literary works (he began publishing in 1891) established him as a promising addition to the symbolist group; but in 1895, after a voyage of self-discovery in North Africa, he turned to the glorification of life and liberty in works close to the spirit of Nietzsche and Whitman.