Word: splendorful
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Louis XIV's labyrinthine palace at Versailles took 56,000 men, 9,000 horses and 20 years to build, and cost $100 million. But in recent years it has become increasingly apparent that King Louis' builders valued surface splendor above sturdiness. In 1925, John D. Rockefeller Jr. went to Versailles' rescue with $1,360,000, most of which was used to repair the 27 acres of roofs. Last week André Cornu, under secretary of fine arts, warned that unless the government can raise another $15 million for repairs* the palace may go to pieces without much...
Sardines, Dimes, Cheese. After the war, Jo took off for Russia, hoping to fill out his plastic history with a bust of Lenin. He never got Lenin, but he got a host of influential underlings. When Foreign Minister Chicherin, who lived in great splendor, heard that Karl Radek, who lunched off sardines on newspaper,* was being sculpted, Chicherin remarked to Jo: "What a curious man, Radek. Why does he go on living in such squalor? . . . After all, there has been the revolution." "He is a curious man, Chicherin," confided Radek. "Look at the way he lives. You would never know...
...months in the shooting at Italy's Cinecitta Studios, nine minutes short of three hours in the theater, the picture recreates ancient Rome with massive splendor and lavish detail. Nero's court lolls midst pleasures and palaces. Massed legions march in triumph through crowd-choked avenues. Mobs flee the burning city and storm Nero's palace. Christian martyrs fall to a pack of lions, burn by the score at rows of stakes in the arena of the Circus Maximus. One of them, Ursus...
...first a concession to sartorial splendor. That stubble had to go. And he wasn't the bald-headed eagle. A little slickum, a little polish, smooth out a few of those wrinkles, he'd been letting himself get seedy lately. Look old, feel old. Now to get rid of that . . . . . . pot belly. There must be something to do about that. Some steam and a quick rubdown. Not too much; there was a beautiful day to be lived outside...
...Yale was two hundred years old. Describing the bi-centennial celebration in New Haven, Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard wrote," It was a great success as an advertisement and interesting in many ways. But there was a total lack of splendor; there was not dignity or stateliness in the arrangements. The most serious lack was the absence of any presentation of the true ideal of a great university and of its supreme function in a modern democratic society...