Word: mistresses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...time), top Rembrandt price of the year. What makes the painting choice is that it dates from Rembrandt's early 50s, when he had risen by force of character above the shallows of his personal life to enter his last and greatest period. In Woman Weeping, his mistress and favorite model, Hendrickje Stoffels (who was censured repeatedly by the church elders for her life with Rembrandt), appears in a masterful psychological portrait depicting a woman caught during the fleeting moment when she has just managed to stifle her sobs. It may well be a study for a late Rembrandt...
...follow the Cross, and if we have true faith in this symbol, we will conquer." The facts will always remain astonishing-how Cortés scuttled his ten ships (not "burned behind him," but dismantled and sunk, despite legend and the Encyclopaedia Britannica) and with his Aztec mistress, 400 Spaniards, 15 horses and ten cannons, advanced against the unknown things that lay behind an 18,000-ft. mountain wall. The fantastic outcome-in which Spanish chivalry and Christian faith matched themselves against the Mexican capital, set like a city of legend amid its lagoons in the mountains-takes...
...Whose play, in turn, was based on a real character, Micaela Villegas, a celebrated actress in 18th century Peru who became an aging viceroy's mistress and lived in a dazzling palace he built for her. Her end is shrouded in legend. In his novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder relates that her beauty was so marred by smallpox that she never afterwards left her mansion, except when she sought solace in a convent. Her nickname, La Perricholi, is supposedly a combination of chola, which in Peru means a woman of mixed birth, and perra, which...
...successful was Collins' pursuit that "the woman in white," Caroline Graves, was his mistress throughout his life. Nobody knows if the story she told him-that she was fleeing from a brutal hypnotist who kept her imprisoned in his villa-is true or not, but many still know the great piece of fiction that Wilkie Collins made of it. The Woman in White ran in 1859-60 as a serial in Charles Dickens' magazine, All the Year Round, and though it followed Dickens' own Tale of Two Cities, it boosted circulation above even the Dickens level. Serialized...
...perpetrated such a frightful crime? After a night of questioning, the police got the answer from the criminal himself-the frustrated surgeon-turned-priest, who had performed his first operation on the dead body of his mistress. "I offered Régine absolution before I killed her," said the Abbé Desnoyers...