Word: xvi
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...Bowman, probably dead (if we are to interpret make-up in conventional terms) finds himself in a room decorated with Louis XVI period furniture with fluorescent-light floors. He sees himself at different stages of old age and physical decay. Perhaps he is seeing representative stages of what is life would have been had he not been drawn into the infinite. As a bed-ridden dying man, the monolith appears before him and he reaches out to it. He is replaced by a glowing embryo on the bed and, presumably, reborn or transfigured into an embryo-baby enclosed...
...final appearance of the Louis XVI room suggests that Bowman was, in fact, being observed as if he were a rat in a maze, perhaps to test his readiness for a further progression, this time a transcendence. The decor of the room is probably not significant, and is either an arbitrary choice made by the observers, or else a projection of Bowman's own personality (the floor and the food are specifically within Bowman's immediate frame of reference...
...Gramont regards style as a capacity for coping inventively with everything from the design of waistcoats ("the historical monuments of our age," a Louis XVI courtier called them) to the conduct of diplomacy. In his survey, the palace at Versailles and the royalty that lived there soon come to represent elegance proliferating unproductively upon itself. The palace and its people become a symbol of style divorced from reality, in which monarchy turned into a kind of theatrical corruption...
...Gramont sees it, the times were not so much ripe for revolution as overripe with monarchy. Louis XVI was so far out of touch with the changing political style that he did not even suspect a dangerous parallel when he saw one-the American Revolution. While Marie Antoinette gushed about "our good republicans, our good Americans," Louis, it is said, made a gift of a Sevres chamber pot with Benjamin Franklin's likeness on the base...
...toilet paper in saddle bags and spigots of 18-karat gold. No two guest rooms are alike, and once a guest settles on a favorite, he is likely to insist on the same room year after year. Three suites are patterned after the chambers of Louis XIV, XV and XVI. But Sophia Loren favors No. 414, the so-called Royal Suite, copied from Josephine's boudoir at Malmaison...