Word: duchesses
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Inside Spain, ancient monarchist families painfully felt a new, hostile attitude. It was rumored that Jacobo Maria del Pilar Carlos Manuel Fitz-James Stuart Falco, Duke of Alba (Britain's Duke of Berwick), the Duchess of Medina Sidonia, the Duke of Medinaceli and others were fined a half million pesetas for signing a royalist manifesto. It was fact that Alba and five more "ceased" to be members of the Cortes, that royalist officials were fired, that royalist university professors were assaulted by Falangist students...
...Duke of Windsor, who promised that the next time he saw London it would be with the Duchess, hopped over from Paris without her. He said something about getting some shirts mended, talked to his King brother, his old friend Winston Churchill, many another high-placed personage, and hopped back to Paris trailing clouds of speculation. Meantime in Paris his shocked valet de chambre scotched the tale of the shirt, informed reporters: "But really he would never think of having his shirts mended in London. This is the place for that. Why, in Paris the needlework is simply extraordinary...
Bitten Fruit. Goya found extramural solace with vivacious María Teresa, Duchess of Alba, whose reputation at court was as scandalous as his own. Warned a well-meaning friend: "This particular fruit already has lots of bites in it." But Goya paid no heed. When he saw Teresa, "a tingle of delicious pain hovered at the edge of [his] eyelids." Most of Author White's lively novel is the story of this 20-year attachment...
Goya's sketches and paintings of his aristocratic mistress became world-famed. He painted Teresa spread voluptuously on a divan, draped in white silk and gave the portrait to her husband. Then he painted her nude in the same posture, and kept it for himself.* Sometimes the Duchess graciously sent Goya's family tasty, palace-cooked tidbits on gold plates. Sensible Señora Goya used to eat the tidbits and keep the plates. When the Inquisition put a sleuth on the lovers' tracks, Goya caught the sleuth and calmly skinned the soles of his feet with...
...Madrid, the present Duke of Alba is awaiting the result of his order to exhume the 13th Duchess of Alba in order to solve two 143-year-old mysteries: 1) did she die of poison? 2) was she the model for Goya's famed nude...