Word: xiv
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...Longer than any other European monarch save France's Louis XIV, who beat him by a year...
Whatever Louis XIV wanted, Louis XIV got-in art as well as in life. In payment he gave royal protection, and no one basked more deliciously in the Sun King's rays than Charles Le Brun, "First Painter of the King" and for 20 years the absolute arbiter and benevolent tyrant of le bon gout français. Swept into museum storerooms as succeeding generations downgraded 17th century classicism, Le Brun has been rehabilitated this summer in an almost too complete exhibition at the Château de Versailles...
Besides being an indefatigable woman chaser who didn't care what he mixed with his Bourbon blood, France's Louis XIV was a fatherly figure who did his best to treat his bastards as if they were true princes. Decked out with noble titles, married off to peers of the realm, the royal by-blows took their places in court and kingdom beside their legitimate brothers. Thus raised high by the king's power alone, the king's shadow family was a perfect gauge of his fortunes...
Prison Bound. It was no surprise therefore that Maine's dwarf-sized duchess believed herself to be a fairy princess. She nearly beggared the Due trying to make the fairyland divertissements at their chateau in Sceaux out rival the splendors of Versailles. As Louis XIV aged, she relentlessly drove her unwilling Due into the struggle over the succession. And under the regency of the Due d'Orleans that followed, she plotted with the court of Spain to put Maine in power and got her helpless husband thrown into prison on charges of treason...
...were often uncut diamonds like Jean Baptiste Poquelin, son of a long line of upholsterers. The Jesuits put him on a diet of Terence, Lucretius, and French drama. Wielding a pen sharper than a needle, he became the playwright Molière. Perverts & Premiers. All this so impressed Louis XIV, the Sun King, that in 1682 he took over the place and declared "Ourself founder." The faculty, rendering unto Caesar, removed "Jesus" from the front door and put up "Ludovici Magni" (Louis-le-grand). The pleased king founded a foreign-language study annex in Constantinople and a scholarship fund that...