Word: courtier
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...before he was out of his teens. He built into Versailles a private snuggery known as "the little apartments" (a scant 50 rooms and seven bathrooms), and when this, in turn, became too public, Louis chopped it into smaller and smaller hideouts. In these "rats' nests" (as one courtier contemptuously described them), the King's absolute power lay hidden like the germ in a seed of wheat. The bulk of the palace was no more than a magnificent husk...
...perhaps because the firmly established tonalities of his Ave Verum Corpus seemed restrictive and sentimental when placed next to the more highly flexible modal style. A group of chansons by Debussy, however, by no means conveyed this sense of restriction. Set to poems by Charles D'Orleans, a medieval courtier-poet, the chansons caught the naivete, humor, as well as the basically tragic outlook which characterizes much of the courtly literature. The only contemporary works on the program, a group of motets by Leo Preger, effectively dramatized some familiar Scriptural quotations...
...Frederick Ponsonby was "a courtier to his fingertips." Three British sovereigns -Queen Victoria, King Edward VII and King George V-employed him as private secretary, equerry and Keeper of the Privy Purse, and in the last year of his life (1935) he was rewarded with a peerage. Ponsonby could speak bluntly or subtly to all kinds of men, and he could ride a horse as smartly as he could snub an upstart. But he was no stick; he dreamed of writing film scripts and was "always interested in the possibility of raising King John's treasure from the Wash...
...personal untidiness upsets some of his friends, but one of them, Actor Arthur Macrae, thinks it more deliberate than careless: "After all, Charles is a funny-looking sort of fellow, and he knows it. There's no sense trying to have an air of an 18th century courtier when you look like that." Laughton, even blunter about his appearance, says flatly: "I have a face like the behind of an elephant...
...rebuffed one eager courtier with: "Who do you think you are-Mr. Forward of 1951?" For the most unflattering, see MISCELLANY...