Word: helena
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...gave them names and ages. Caspar, King of Tarsus, was often represented as a beardless youth of 20; Balthazar, King of Ethiopia, was a black man of about 40; Melchior, King of Arabia, was supposed to be 60. Their remains were said to have been found by St. Helena, the relic-hunting mother of Constantine the Great, and later brought to Cologne Cathedral, which claims them today...
...life of Napoleon and his retinue on St. Helena is a kind of tragicomic parody of those scenes in Shakespeare where the king moves his court to some enchanted forest to frolic and philosophize. In a graphic, day-by-day account of the exile years, Historian Ralph Korngold reveals the constant bickering and backbiting of the Napoleonic entourage. Napoleon himself, argues Korngold, may have been hounded to a premature death by the erratic restrictions and petty cruelties of the British governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, a fussy, indecisive simpleton...
Chess, Anyone? As for Gourgaud, he was a temperamental bachelor who seems to have had a homosexual crush on Napoleon, but Bonaparte was strictly heterosexual, and Gourgaud eventually left the island in a vicious pet. Las Cases had gone to St. Helena for the book he knew Napoleon had in him, and took dictation till his eyes gave out. Indeed, they all took dictation and kept journals, perhaps suspecting posterity's avalanche of books about Napoleon, though some of the entries are revealingly non-Napoleonic, e.g., Gourgaud's statement that if Las Cases tried...
...last days on St. Helena had little romance. Defections and deportations had riddled his last command. He was in agony, either from stomach cancer or a perforated ulcer, but his doctors were too incompetent to diagnose his case. At dawn on May 5, 1821, with his mind wandering, Napoleon said, "Who retreats?", then: "At the head of the army." They were his last words...
...Alison and her upper-middle-class family and friends. His wife loves him despite his ambition to "stand up in your tears, splash about in them and sing." But finally she has had enough and goes home to her parents, not telling Jimmy that she is pregnant. Her friend Helena (deftly played by Claire Bloom), a visitor in their garret, remains. Jimmy calls her an "evil-minded little virgin," but she becomes his mistress. In the end, his wife returns; the baby has miscarried and Alison is now broken enough to resume in resignation the aimless life in the attic...