Word: maintenon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...King's standards at that time. Even royal princes had to ask permission to visit. "Delicious gardens!" exclaimed that great collector of court gossip, the Duc de Saint-Simon. And in Louis XIV's day, the gardens did not stop at the doors; his mistress, Madame de Maintenon, liked to change color and perfume by rearranging the Trianon's million flower pots daily...
Convulsive Barking. Louis Auguste de Bourbon, first (and last) Due du Maine, was a man all but killed by royal kindness. The son of Madame de Montespan, Louis' most beautiful mistress, he became protégé of Madame de Maintenon, Louis' most enduring love. Thoughtful, diffident, unworldly, the Due had no gift for the great stage onto which fate and father thrust...
Recounting these personal details, Author Lewis also keeps track of great events-the massing of European sovereigns against Louis, the battle of Blenheim, where French military pride suffered its most decisive setback. He is persistently concerned with rectifying the long-distorted picture of Maine and Madame de Maintenon, both of whom are customarily presented as monsters of intrigue and ambition...
...dolphin (rampant), a lion (couchant), or embellished with the "blue magnolia design." ^ In 1900 the Syphonic Closet of the Century was announced. It was clean and decent, but it missed the pungent grandeur of the commode from which Louis XIV announced his forthcoming marriage to Mme. de Maintenon. And it cannot have given its users the satisfaction of the chamber pot, or jerry, available to Britons around 1800, whose interior was limned with a portrait of Napoleon...
Order of Aphrodites. But from the moralist's point of view, the worst was to come. It was the era of the great royal mistresses (Maintenon, Pompadour, Du Barry) and of the monsters of sex (notably the Marquis de Sade). It.was also the Age of Enlightenment, and medical science was eagerly enlisted in the service of love. Late in Louis XIV's reign, a certain Dr. Venette soberly advised that dried Egyptian crocodile kidneys pounded into a powder and diluted in sweet wine made the perfect aphrodisiac...