Word: duchess
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...Parisian courtesan, marry a duke, and die the mistress of a robber-chief. From autumn 1839 to spring 1842 Stendhal sketched the outline of her progress from rags to riches. He described her adoption by a childless couple, her entry as a servant-companion into the household of a duchess, her initiation into the facts of upper-class life, i.e., mingled boredom, bitchery, fear and arrogance. He did portraits of varying completeness of the men in her life, ranging from a Machiavellian, hunchbacked doctor to a simple Norman peasant whom Lamiel pays 15 francs to teach her the nature...
...commentators of the i gth century found the lady less cheerful than beguiling. Theophile Gautier wrote that her "sinuous, serpentine mouth, turned up at the corners, in the violet shadows, mocks you with so much gentleness, grace and superiority, that you feel suddenly intimidated, like a schoolboy before a duchess...
...Madrid, the Duchess of Valencia, shapely, 36-year-old monarchist critic of Franco, suggested that her country's diplomatic corps needs a woman's touch: "I would not be surprised if Stalin's trouble is the lack of feminine influence over him. I think a woman might be able to accomplish far more with him than the Western statesmen have been able to do. I wish I could be Spanish Ambassador in Moscow . . . If I were Spanish envoy in the United States, I would go fishing with President Truman...
Havoc & Confession. Thereafter, Beverley met everyone, from Gertrude Stein (like "seeing Gibraltar at dawn") to Queen Elizabeth (he played her a Chopin étude when she was Duchess of York). But the person who turned his glamorous life upside down was Journalist Dorothy Woodman (wife of New Statesman Editor Kingsley Martin), who convinced him in the twinkling of an eye that war was just "a racket." Beverley had found the "cause" he needed to balance his "idiotic life" as a bright young thing. The book that resulted from his conversion, Cry Havoc (1933), proved to be one of the influential...
...private plane, the Independence. At 3 that same afternoon, the Queen's husband Philip went to London Airport to meet his aunt, the Queen of Sweden, and her royal husband Gustaf Adolf. Exiled Prince Paul of Yugoslavia came, and was whisked off by his sister-in-law the Duchess of Kent-just in time to avoid meeting Yugoslavia's Communist President Ribar. Francisco Franco's Foreign Minister got in from Lisbon just before the Pretender to the Spanish throne. The King and Queen of Denmark steamed into Harwich harbor under an escort of British destroyers...