United States or Solomon Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When Louis XIV. offered Rameau a title, he answered, touching his breast and forehead, "My nobility is here and here." This composer marked a step forward in French music, for he gave it more boldness and freedom, and was the first really scientific and well-equipped exponent of a national school. His choruses were full of energy and fire, his orchestral effects rich and massive.
From the beginning the Hohenzollern have been identified with the Prussian State. Louis XIV. said of himself, “L’état c’est moi,” but Louis XIV. was an exception in modern French history. On the contrary, every Hohenzollern could have applied to himself the words of the Bourbon King. If we take each individual Hohenzollern, we find the most obvious differences between them.
The brilliancy and magnificence of the court, as well as the reign of Louis XIV., were such that the least details of his life seem interesting to posterity, just as they excited the curiosity of every court in Europe and of all his contemporaries. Such is the effect of a great reputation.
The chateau region in Touraine is a treasure land of architectural beauty. In the time of Louis XIV Le Nôtre changed many of these old chateaux from their fortified state to the more open form made possible by a peaceful life.
The guests waited in a first salon until the doors of the grand salon were opened, the women seated, the men standing. As soon as the prince and princess appeared the doors were thrown wide open and everybody went in. This grand salon is a very fine room. The ceiling is evidently of the time of Louis XIV. The wails are hung with green damask striped with gold.
Of course everyone knows about the Park at Versailles, but everyone forgets, so I shall review the history of the Park briefly, that you may appreciate our thrills when we really owned a bit of it. Louis XIV selected Versailles as the site for the royal palace when it was a swampy, uninteresting little farm.
Sainte-Foix hastened to reply, upholding the soundness of the views he had advanced. It is not to be supposed that Louis XIV would have chosen a family vault in which to bury a log of wood.
The shrewdest of French historians, De Tocqueville, has somewhere remarked that "the physiognomy of a government may be best judged in the colonies.... When I wish to study the spirit and faults of the administration of Louis XIV," he writes, "I must go to Canada, for its deformity is there seen as through a microscope." That is entirely true.
The death of Gillis Valckenier, the ablest of the leaders of the opposition in Amsterdam, in 1680 left the control of affairs in that city in the hands of Nicolaes Witsen and Johan Hudde, but these were men of less vigour and determination than Valckenier. Louis XIV meanwhile had been actively pushing forward his schemes of aggrandisement.
The old French territorial, with wrinkled face and an effort at a military mustache, who came out of his sentry box at a control post squinting by the light of a lantern held close to his nose at the bit of paper which gave the bearer freedom of the army and nodding with his polite word of concurrence, was a type who might have stopped a traveler in Louis XIV.'s time.
Word Of The Day