Word: xv
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Later, his imitative successors managed to make even sensualism a fraud. Contrary to legend, Louis XV's notorious Deer Park, explains De Gramont, was devoted to rather small-scale lechery-"more of a tired businessman's retreat than a royal orgy-house." Worse, Madame de Pompadour was, by Louis' testimony, cold as a coot, though she plied herself with aphrodisiacs of hot chocolate laced with vanilla, truffles and celery soup. She spent most of her energies keeping official appointments and answering as many as 60 letters a day. Her rewards were the unglamorous ailments of the busy...
Imprisoned for political offenses under Louis XV, Francois Marie Arouet changed his name to Voltaire in order to make a fresh start as a writer. The Rev. C. L. Dodgson used the pseudonym Lewis Carroll because he thought it beneath the dignity of a clergyman and a mathematician to write a book like Alice in Wonderland. Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) and Lucile-Aurore Dupin (George Sand) used men's names because they felt women au thors were discriminated against in the 19th century. These days, pseudonymity is again in vogue, but the reasons are hardly as compelling...
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806), a protégé of Madame du Barry's who was appointed one of Louis XV's official architects in 1773, designed a spherical county ranger's house, 50 royal toll houses and observation posts, and a workers city for the state-owned saltworks of the Franche-Comté. The French Revolution intervened before any of his projects were built; but his company towns have long since been translated into reality...
...usually the best, as for instance Diderot's Encyclopédie distinction between the words bind and attach: "One is bound to one's wife, attached to one's mistress." But the authors also do reasonably well on their own, as when they say of Louis XV that he "lacked the art of dying in due time...
...target of Benigni's agents was the heresy of modernism-a broad term encompassing the efforts of certain scholarly priests and laymen to bring Catholic teaching into line with contemporary scientific and philosophic thought. In 1921, long after the leading modernists had been excommunicated, Pope Benedict XV sensibly suppressed Benigni's spy ring. The memory of modernism has been kept alive, however, by a solemn oath against the heresy* that every Catholic priest since 1910 has had to take before receiving holy orders. Last week, Vatican sources reported, Pope Paul VI decided to abolish the oath-taking requirement...