Word: besnard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gogh as traced by the wide-ranging - and often surprising - roster of artists and works he admired. It ain't all Rembrandt, by any means, and along with Dürer, Honoré Daumier and Delacroix are unlikelier inspirations, such as Fritz von Uhde, Hubert von Herkomer and Albert Besnard. But the obscure artists are an intriguing piece of the artist's aesthetic puzzle, and some of them are, as Van Gogh said, "damned good." The museum's researchers have tallied references to more than 1,100 artworks in Van Gogh's copious correspondence: 485 paintings, 52 drawings, 567 prints...
Exhumed & Examined. The legend of Marie Besnard began in the gossip mills of Loudun. Over the years, Marie and her husband Léon had inherited from relatives six houses, two farms, an inn and a café. Amid all this affluence, Léon invited his mistress, Loudun Postmistress Louise Pintou, to move in with him and his wife. But when it was whispered that Marie herself took a lover-a former German prisoner of war 30 years her junior-Léon apparently protested. Several days later, after becoming violently ill over lunch, Léon died; local...
...gossips had it otherwise. But only after the death of Marie's 78-year-old mother 15 months later did the police begin to take the rumors seriously. Exhuming the body of Léon Besnard, they found it to contain a heavy dose of arsenic. The state took 31 months to build its case. Townspeople recalled that Marie had once recommended arsenic to an unhappily married friend as a substitute for a hard-to-get divorce and that Léon had asked friends to have an autopsy performed if he died suddenly. Postmistress Pintou flatly accused Marie...
...Marie's lawyer quickly shattered the state's case by disproving Dr. Beroud's contention that he could tell arsenic from antimony with the naked eye. Adjourning the trial, the judge sent Marie Besnard back to "preventive detention," appointed a panel of three new experts. They spent two years re-examining the bodies brought up from Loudun's cemetery, eliminated five more corpses from the list of victims...
...toxicology came to her aid. The experts could not agree, and one became so flustered that he had a tantrum on the witness stand, sat down, crossed his legs, folded his arms, and refused to speak. Thoroughly bewildered, the judge called for a panel of "superexperts," released Marie Besnard on bail, ordered a new trial in "the near future...