Death
Recognizing that she was dying, Dorsey rewrote her will in 1878. She bequeathed all her capital and, more importantly, Beauvoir to Jefferson Davis. Dorsey died in the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans on July 4, 1879, at the age of fifty. She had undergone an unsuccessful operation for cancer performed by Dr. T. G. Richardson, assisted by Dr. Rudolph Matas.
The Percy family sued but failed to break the will. After Jefferson Davis' death in 1889, Beauvoir was adapted as a home for Confederate veterans. Many were buried after their deaths in the cemetery behind the house. After the last veteran died, the property was adapted as a house museum.
Read more about this topic: Sarah Dorsey
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship—only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier.”
—Erica Jong (b. 1942)
“When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)