Word: xiv
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Daughter of France, by V. Sackville-West. A witty portrait of the lumbering spinster who was Louis XIV's cousin, against a backdrop of her brilliant and squalid...
...17th century a French consul dug down into the dunes, sent hundreds of ornate columns to Louis XIV. At the start of the 19th century an English sea captain sent home a second load of marble loot. It now ornaments the grounds at Windsor Castle. The winds blew and the dunes again covered what was left, until digging began in earnest in modern times...
...Orleans, Duchess of Montpensier, Chatellerault and St. Fargeau, Sovereign of Dombes, Princess of Joinville and Laroche-sur-Yon. Dauphine of Auvergne, and Fille de France, was something of a royal office joke. But since the office was the 17th century French court-Louis XIII was her uncle, Louis XIV her first cousin-the lady left footnotes in the sands of time. Biographer V. (for Victoria Mary) Sackville-West, 67, has written a witty, informal, entertaining book about the bedeviled woman who was known not by her titles, but with simple Bourbon haughtiness as plain Mademoiselle...
...most lascivious court in Europe, she fell passionately in love with a toy-soldier-sized captain in the king's guards, one Count de Lauzun, who was half a dozen years and a foot or so her junior. She wooed him ardently. For three happy days, Louis XIV gave his grudging consent to the match, then withdrew it when a storm of popular protest blew up. The Sun King broke Mademoiselle's heart with the wondrously uncharacteristic words: "Kings must please the public...
Mademoiselle crammed her voluminous journals with vivid vignettes. One episode she understandably failed to record concerned Count de Lauzun who hid under the bed of Mme. de Montespan, mistress to Louis XIV, and later mimicked her conversation back to her word for word. Mademoiselle did describe the bloodiest battle of the Fronde, when she saw the Duke de la Rochefoucauld staggering toward her, "having received a musket-ball through his eyes and nose, so that his eyes seemed to be falling out, and he kept blowing the blood away as though he feared one of his eyes might fall into...