Word: royalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Private Secretary to His Majesty King Hussein Chief of Royal Protocol Amman...
Cold as a Coot. In making visibility "the primary function of the King," says De Gramont, Louis XIV reduced the royal drama to pageantry-style's exquisite confession of meaninglessness. Even the King's defecation became a public act staged on a stool decorated with mother-of-pearl landscapes...
Later, his imitative successors managed to make even sensualism a fraud. Contrary to legend, Louis XV's notorious Deer Park, explains De Gramont, was devoted to rather small-scale lechery-"more of a tired businessman's retreat than a royal orgy-house." Worse, Madame de Pompadour was, by Louis' testimony, cold as a coot, though she plied herself with aphrodisiacs of hot chocolate laced with vanilla, truffles and celery soup. She spent most of her energies keeping official appointments and answering as many as 60 letters a day. Her rewards were the unglamorous ailments of the busy...
Under Louis XV, the grand gesture -that splendid self-expression of all royal stylists-degenerated so far that one royal prince built a marble mausoleum for a pet monkey named McCarthy. Similar distortions of value took place in more important aspects of public life. Diplomacy, once the French national art, so deteriorated that it came to fit the job description given by Beaumarchais, author of The Marriage of Figaro: "Spread spies, pension traitors, loosen seals, intercept letters...
...this nothing of a King fell due the bill for 800 years of divine rights. With his fat and graceless neck, the least stylish of monarchs bore final witness to the death of the royal life style. He paid to make possible "the passage from one world to another"-from all that a monarchy assumes to all that a republic promises...