Word: empresse
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...EMPRESS JOSEPHINE by Ernest Knap-ton. 359 pages. Harvard...
Marie-Josephe-Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie had two great loves. One was "Napoleon Bonaparte, who called her "my matchless little mother" and made her his Empress; the other was Paul Barras, revolutionist and member of the Directory, who remarked that "she would have drunk gold out of the skull of her lover" and referred to her as "the lewd Creole." Barras' estimate of Josephine was the one accepted by most 19th century biographers of Napoleon -chiefly, suggests Historian Ernest Knapton, because she left behind so few words in her own defense (only one "certain and authentic" letter...
...intellectual indolence that infuriated Beauharnais served her well as Empress. She kept out of Bonaparte's affairs, obediently attended any functions she was instructed to, conscientiously memorized the remarks Bonaparte composed for her to use on public occasions. Otherwise, she entertained herself with the theater and with sentimental novels, frequently only sampling them and having others tell her the ending. Her personal expenditures came to about a million francs ($200,000) a year. Her two great extravagances were clothes and Malmaison, the estate outside Paris where she collected exotic flowers, romantic paintings, and such oddities as male and female...
...South Africa's eternal sun, and on enjoying the easy living in a land where nannies and houseboys can still be hired for $30 a month. Said an engineer from England, Philip Bacchus, who with his wife and two children arrived with 526 fellow immigrants on the liner Empress of Britain: "After all, there is trouble everywhere." But won't the new arrivals be sickened at the sight of apartheid? Predicts one observer: "After the initial revulsion, they will, like their predecessors, avert their eyes...
Amid the inscrutable intrigue of old-fashioned tongmen and newfangled business operators in San Francisco's Chinatown, tiny Dolly Gee, 64, was empress of finance. For more than 30 years, she was manager of the Bank of America's pagodalike Chinatown branch. Inheriting the shrewdness of her late father, Chinatown's first banker, Charlie Gee, Dolly built the branch deposits from $2,000,000 to $20 million, dished out hundreds of loans that put a financial base under half of Chinatown's enterprises during years when Chinese could not even get life insurance. A high point...