Word: xiv
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...mother of harlots and abominations of the earth." Ancient Athens, for all its architectural and intellectual glory, was scarcely more than an overgrown slum; the grandeur of Rome was overshadowed by its ramshackle ghettos, crime rate and traffic jams. Sanitation was so bad in the Paris of Louis XIV that two miles from the city's gates a traveler's nose would tell him that he was drawing near. Scarcely anyone today needs to be told about how awful life is in nerve-jangling New York City, which resembles a mismanaged ant heap rather than a community...
...XIV...
BANEFUL SORCERIES by Joan Sanders. 352 pages. Houghton Mifrlin. $6.95. The mock memoir of a French girl whose marriage to a decadent nobleman is complicated by black Masses and poisonings -some of which actually scandalized the court of Louis XIV. The author succeeds elegantly with baroque setting and sinister plot...
...Gramont writes in the same vein. Tidbits of throwaway intelligence pop to the surface of his book like croutons in a steaming onion soup. The word bourgeois first appeared (as burgensis) in a 1007 charter establishing the free city of Loches. As a result of Versailles banquets, Louis XIV's stomach was found at his death to be twice normal size. The French Foreign Ministry spends $4,000,000 annually in secret funds, allegedly on payoffs. President Georges Pompidou pays rent on his He Saint-Louis apartment to the Rothschilds, who bought it for him when he lacked...
...Aachen, Germany, he received no formal architectural education. But he learned from his father, a master stonemason, to value the particular heft and quality of pure materials. One of his first jobs consisted of designing stucco ornaments for a local architect-"full-size details of Louis XIV in the morning, Renaissance in the afternoon." The experience left him with a lasting disdain for the falseness of decoration and a lasting relish for the honesty of materials. His buildings sprang from them, not from any abstract notion of forms...