Word: vii
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...foremost receptacle of memories, had its lantern roof, the central part of the Abbey directly over the crossing of the nave and transept, burned out. Tons of debris fell on the spot where King George VI and Queen Elizabeth-and many monarchs before them-were crowned. The Henry VII Chapel was damaged, but the Unknown Warrior in his tomb and the poets in their Corner were not disturbed...
...Juan is the third son of a family famed for its Bourbon nose and its unhappiness. Alfonso's Queen, Victoria Eugenia, niece of Britain's Edward VII, carried hemophilia to two of her four sons, bore two daughters who by the implacable laws of hemophilic heredity are carriers themselves. Hemophile Don Alfonso, the eldest son, renounced his right to the crown when he married a wealthy but untitled Cuban, bled to death after an auto accident in Florida three years ago. Earlier, the youngest son, Don Gonzalo, also a bleeder, died after a minor car smash...
...brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne, Goya quickly came to terms with the new regime, and took to painting Bonapartist officials, as he had previously painted Bourbon courtiers. When, a few years later, the Bourbons were restored. Goya changed his coat again. Roared Bourbon Ferdinand VII: "You deserve exile, you merit hanging, but you are a great artist, and I will forget everything...
...Ferdinand VII and his inquisitors were slow at forgetting, and life in Spain for the aging, ailing Goya became increasingly irksome. Stone deaf and myopic at 78, he got permission to leave the country, traveled to Paris "to see the world," finally settled among a group of Spanish refugees in Bordeaux. There, in 1828, still painting and drawing with all his old vigor and many a new-found trick, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes died. A scene he would have enjoyed came on a subsequent fantastic midnight when ghoulish phrenologists stole his skull from the Bordeaux graveyard...
King Haakon VII of Norway: "A proper Christmas cannot be celebrated by the Norwegians in Norway in chains or by Norwegians unable to spend Christmas in their own country with those they love dearest. . . . May peace, freedom and justice reign in Norway in the near future...