Word: parquet
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Strolling over the Louvre's polished parquet floors, Bazin likes to philosophize on two great portraits. Titian's Francis I (who seems to be examining the jewel of his collection, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa) and Hyacinthe Rigaud's Louis XIV (loftily surveying the great expanse of the 300-yard-long Grande Galerie). Both have a right to their proprietary air. Bazin feels, since, along with Napoleon, they are among the Louvre's greatest benefactors...
They planned one day to meet on a palm-shaded lanai in sight of the swimming pool and then, to avoid nosy newsmen, switched with their retinue (five lawyers), like French-farce husbands, from the Atwater Kent Suite to the Mary Martin Suite to the parquet-floored Terrace Room. They looked and acted like directors of General Motors come to dream about new models, but they were the General Executive Board of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters trying to work their way out of trouble...
Inside the Victorian house, Maass finds "a happy, hide-and-seek quality of surprise." Stripped of its overgrowth of large-figured wallpaper, overstuffed chairs, marble-topped tables, potted plants, shellwork, beadwork, fringed cushions, petitpoint mottoes, bric-a-brac, fretwork brackets and tiered whatnots, "the Victorian parlor with its parquet floor, high ceiling, tall windows and ample fireplace emerges as a very handsome room...
...falling from the tree. Yet the essence of Jenkins' war with the world is neither bound to a period nor insularly British. It is essentially a secular tragedy told in the idiom of understatement (which Novelist Powell admits "has its own banality"); there is a pit beneath the parquet floor and the Old School Tie may become a garrote. It needs all his well-tended prose to keep the corpse of nihilism buried in the garden...
...windows, shorn of their rich hangings, had a vacant look about them, and on the White House gates there were neat, white wooden signs: CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC. Inside the mansion, a sander went to work in the East Room, smoothing away pits and scars on the quartered-oak parquet floor. By week's end the floor was ready for filling and waxing. This week a crew of maintenance men will move in to fix the floors, touch up the paneling in the State Dining Room, and dry-clean the soiled draperies and damask wall coverings...