Word: maintenons
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Convulsive Barking. Louis Auguste de Bourbon, first (and last) Due du Maine, was a man all but killed by royal kindness. The son of Madame de Montespan, Louis' most beautiful mistress, he became protégé of Madame de Maintenon, Louis' most enduring love. Thoughtful, diffident, unworldly, the Due had no gift for the great stage onto which fate and father thrust...
...dolphin (rampant), a lion (couchant), or embellished with the "blue magnolia design." ^ In 1900 the Syphonic Closet of the Century was announced. It was clean and decent, but it missed the pungent grandeur of the commode from which Louis XIV announced his forthcoming marriage to Mme. de Maintenon. And it cannot have given its users the satisfaction of the chamber pot, or jerry, available to Britons around 1800, whose interior was limned with a portrait of Napoleon...
Order of Aphrodites. But from the moralist's point of view, the worst was to come. It was the era of the great royal mistresses (Maintenon, Pompadour, Du Barry) and of the monsters of sex (notably the Marquis de Sade). It.was also the Age of Enlightenment, and medical science was eagerly enlisted in the service of love. Late in Louis XIV's reign, a certain Dr. Venette soberly advised that dried Egyptian crocodile kidneys pounded into a powder and diluted in sweet wine made the perfect aphrodisiac...
Louis XIV grows older. Over a subtle background melody, Madame de Maintenon makes her legendary stab at Madame de Montespan: "Last night I dreamt, Madame, that we were on the grand stairs of Versailles: I was going up; you were coming down." The King dies, and several deep orchestral chords seem to roll a tombstone over his entire century. Then Louis XV is on the throne; his meeting with Pompadour is set off by a lilting love song. Music marks a new culture, as from the palace windows twang the pure, shrill notes of the harpsichord. Explains Narrator Boyer: "Grace...
...script, by Robert Ardrey, hangs loosely to the novel but with flaunting style, like a merry kilt to Scottish calves. Moreover, Quentin Durward is as easy on the eyes as on the ears. Much of the film was shot around the finest châteaux-Chenonceaux, Chambord, Maintenon, Fontainebleau-and the graces of French stone and green have lent a coquetry and lightness to these scenes that the art and costume people have tastefully maintained...