Word: fouquet
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...They reveal an astonishing life. A noblewoman of beauty and wealth, Mme. de Sévigné was widowed at 25, when her libertine husband died in a duel over a courtesan. A crush of suitors quickly moved in: Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's ill-fated superintendent of finance; Marshal de Turenne, the outstanding military hero of the era; Prince Armand de Bourbon, a member of the royal family. The widow refused them all. Her deepest affections were held in reserve for her daughter. The occasion for most of the Sévigné letters was the daughter...
Formidably acute and full of zest for life, she found no event too humble for her observation: haymaking, a ramble in the woods, the delight of fresh Breton butter. At the same time she produced brilliant set pieces of aristocratic life: Fouquet's trial and imprisonment on dubious evidence; the suicide of the maitre d'hotel when fish ordered for the King's banquet failed to arrive; the execution of a marquise for mass murder...
Envy was the palace's original inspiration. King Louis XIV, outraged by the opulence of a château built by his Finance Minister Nicolas Fouquet, in 1662 hired Fouquet's architect, Louis le Vau, to create a monumental country palace of glass and champagne-hued stone at Versailles, twelve miles southwest of Paris. By 1685, 36,000 men were at work on the palace, then set within 15,000 acres of nurtured gardens, groves and lawns. Embarrassed by the cost of the project ($1.4 billion in today's dollars), Louis ordered the accounts burned...
...Julie Fouquet '80, chairman of UCHSR, said yesterday she believes Bok's rotation system is vague in failing to state the length of time each student will serve on the committee while allotting two years to both faculty and alumni representatives...
...Julie Fouquet '80, chairman of the Undergraduate Committee on Harvard Shareholder Responsibility (UCHSR), said yesterday, however, that UCHSR will probably not appoint an undergraduate to the ACSR unless the committee and President Bok accept three reforms--democratic elections of all its members, the representation of workers on the committee and the opening of the committee's meetings to the Harvard community. The committee and President Bok rejected the reforms last spring...