Word: montespan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
Mademoiselle crammed her voluminous journals with vivid vignettes. One episode she understandably failed to record concerned Count de Lauzun who hid under the bed of Mme. de Montespan, mistress to Louis XIV, and later mimicked her conversation back to her word for word. Mademoiselle did describe the bloodiest battle of the Fronde, when she saw the Duke de la Rochefoucauld staggering toward her, "having received a musket-ball through his eyes and nose, so that his eyes seemed to be falling out, and he kept blowing the blood away as though he feared one of his eyes might fall into...
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...
...Carp at Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV was said to resemble Madame de Maintenon to an extraordinary degree. The story was finally traced to Madame de Montespan...
...Casteret inhaled enough breath for two minutes, dived into the tunnel, ready to turn back after one minute if he did not reach the siphon's end. It was short, however, and he soon emerged into another grotto. This was the beginning of explorations in the Grotte de Montespan which eventually led to the discovery of subterranean galleries inhabited by the Magdalenian cave dwellers of 20,000 years ago. Some of the Magdalenian clay images of animals were riddled with holes, apparently made by spears. Others had arrows or human hands carved on their flanks: symbols of human domination...