Was Richard an innocent man unjustly blamed for their deaths, or was his funeral last week – complete with tearful crowds clutching white York roses, the Countess of Wessex and Benedict Cumberbatch (Richard's third cousin, 16 times removed, gasped divine-right fetishists) – a tasteless glorification of a double child-murderer?
With a will she took on Norma, Lucia, Violetta in "La Traviata", Elvira in "I Puritani", the Countess in "Le Nozze di Figaro".
If Albania had any particular appeal it could be that so insignificant a country could hardly be coveted by the competing ideologies in Europe of fascism and communism.Geraldine Apponyi de Nagi-Appony, a Hungarian countess, mulled over such matters when she received a visit in 1937 from a sister of King Zog.
In the end, she turned out to be countess Eve Hanska, a Polish aristocrat living in Ukraine.
"I AM desperate," wrote Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, a blind Italian countess, in 1808 to her beau, Pellegrino Turri.
It's rather like seeing a countess begging in the gutter.
A glance to one side of the long rectangular room takes in a large cubist Picasso, a delicate painting of a countess by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, an iconic mechanical nude by Fernand Léger, an odd portrait of two children by Théodore Géricault and a rare wooden primitivist sculpture by Constantin Brancusi that was once in Léger's own collection.
"Wedlock", her previous book, followed the misfortunes of a certain countess at the hands of her abusive husband, who gets his comeuppance to the cheers of every reader.
"The Marschallin, the leading role [sung in Salzburg by Krassimira Stoyanova, a Bulgarian soprano], is the equivalent of the Countess in Figaro .But Strauss' homage to the earlier composer is not slapstick comedy.
Mr Pierrot's "Eve de Balzac" is the first extensive biography based on the many letters that Balzac and the Countess wrote each other, and it provides a rich insight into both his work in progress and the cultural interests that brought them together.Through his Polish countess, Balzac perfected his knowledge of women.
He could trace his descent on his father's side from the royal house of Wittelsbach; his mother, the Countess of Treuberg, was related to the kings of Brazil.
