Word: teau
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...convent-educated London typist, Pierre-Joël Delaitre was all that a storybook French nobleman should be: tall, educated, tastefully dressed, charming, wealthy. To those who knew him better, he was also mean, hot-tempered, pampered, and a wastrel. Reared in luxury at the 18th century Château de Mainténiac, Pierre was the scourge of the neighborhood-borrowing the tenants' farm horses to race across country, frightening the villagers of nearby Préchâtel by roaring through their marketplace in his racing car. He frittered away a fortune and tried to recoup...
...Plans for Pompadour's "Petit Château...
Modern Frenchmen had forgotten all about the Petit Château but in Louis XV's day it set their ancestors' tongues wagging from one end of France to the other. Frenchmen could only guess at what went on in the privacy of the little château. The royal architects discouraged prying eyes by setting its nine rooms-two boudoirs, dining room, a few guest rooms-in a small garden surrounded by a high wall. Even the servants were kept out of sight. The banquet room was equipped with an ingenious table volante, which could be lowered...
...Sample menu: four soups, three terrines of foie gras, countless hors d'oeuvres, 16 meat courses, partridge, chicken, song birds, pheasant, turkey, squab, 14 desserts, creams and cakes. And Paris had ample evidence that, in her later years, Pompadour turned from mistress to madam, filled the château with a succession of pretty girls to drive away His Majesty's boredom...
After Louis died in 1774, his hideaway fell on hard times. Louis XVI never used it, and during the French Revolution the royal residences at Choisy-le-Roi were wrecked. For a time, a locksmith occupied the site of the Petit Château; later a tile factory was built on the grounds. No one dreamed that so much as two stones of the old building, with its rich trim and fine, high windows, were left standing...