Yolande de Polastron - Illness and Death

Illness and Death

Gabrielle developed a terminal illness while living in Switzerland, although she had arguably been in poor health for several years. She died in Austria in December 1793, shortly after hearing of the execution of Marie-Antoinette. Her family simply announced that she had died as a result of heartbreak and suffering. Most historians have concluded that she died of cancer, though contradictory royalist reports of her death suggested consumption as an alternative cause. No specific mention of her disease was made in the various allegorical pamphlets which showed the Angel of Death descending to take the soul of the still-beautiful duchesse de Polignac. Her beauty and early death became metaphors for the demise of the old regime, at least in early pamphlets and in subsequent family correspondence, the duchess's beauty was a much-emphasised point.

Read more about this topic:  Yolande De Polastron

Famous quotes containing the words illness and/or death:

    Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.
    Camille Paglia (b. 1947)

    I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.
    Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)