Word: mitfordly
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...KING, by Nancy Mitford. As an ornithologist studying the noble birds at Louis XIV's Court of Versailles, Author Mitford is more interested in song and plumage than ecology, but her illustrated portrait of that resplendent monarch is a tidy job of dissection...
...KING, by Nancy Mitford. As an ornithologist studying the noble birds at Louis XlV's Court of Versailles, Author Mitford is more interested in song and plumage than strict biology, but her illustrated portrait of that resplendent monarch is a tidy job of dissection...
Life among the humanoids of outer space-if such ever come to light-could not be more remote from the modern world than the bizarre and ceremonious existence of Louis XIV. With learning and flair, Nancy Mitford, the biographer of Voltaire and Madame de Pompadour, employs an elegant and aphoristic style to match the complexity and splendor of her subject: the building of Versailles, and its principal inhabitant, the Sun King, revered as a demigod by his 20 million subjects...
...Mitford's monarch was a bit of a monster, and although the term would have been unthinkable to a regime based on blood, he was a self-made monster; he lived like the Minotaur, that legendary prince of Knossos, in the center of his own labyrinth...
...workmen and architects were always improving and fixing things up there, or at Chambord, or wherever he moved. "Nobody," writes the author, "ever knew when this secret man first conceived the design by which his father's little hunting lodge was to become the hub of the universe." Mitford's tentative guess is the simple explanation that Louis liked the country; he lived on horseback and was a great shot. The hindsight of history alleges that he was afraid of the Parisians, but this was not quite so ("Fear was left out of his nature...