Word: corvo
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...glad for a job as one of Napoleon's generals. His military exploits were negligible, but he was a good politician and his wife was the sister of Joseph Bonaparte's wife. With these advantages, the Emperor made him a marshal and later Prince of Ponte Corvo...
Frederick William Rolfe ("Baron Corvo") belongs with those eccentrics of literature whose books are caviar to the general. He experimented with words of his own concoction long before Joyce. His tales bear the stamp of strange originality. His life was that of a would-be priest, painter, novelist, historian, outcast, ascetic, sensualist, madman...
Author Symons calls his book "An Experiment in Biography." His scheme has been to take readers along with him in his "quest" for the man behind the legend while he unearths old letters, lost manuscripts, people who knew Corvo. The book is the story of a personality. It is also the story of the story. The trail begins in 1925 when Symons first hears of his man through reading Hadrian the Seventh, Corvo's tale of a young English Catholic who becomes Pope. Struck by its power and originality, he makes inquiries about the author, hears many a contradictory yarn...
...there were those who believed in him. He was given another chance and sent to Rome to study for the priesthood in Scots College. Dismissed after five months for "lack of Vocation'' and as a general nuisance, Rolfe returned to England claiming he had acquired the title of "Baron Corvo." Throughout his life he remained a Catholic zealot, thought of himself as the one true Catholic, believed the Church and its modern priesthood were conspiring against him. He found "the Faith comfortable and the Faithful intolerable." Biographer Symons calls his failure to make the priesthood the first step...
...article in Wide World Magazine by "Baron Corvo" telling how he was once buried alive resulted in a vitriolic newspaper attack in which his history and pretensions were reviewed. This was the second step in his persecution complex. But Stories Toto Told Me (first published in The Yellow Book), In His Own Image, Hadrian the Seventh, Don Tarquinio, Chronicles of the House of Borgia and his translation (from the French translation) of Omar Khayyam won him friends and literary recognition, although he made only about...