Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (50 page)

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Authors: Edith Wharton

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Daniel Huntington (1816-1906), an American portrait painter.

Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889), a French painter.

In the Bible (Esther 8:3), Queen Esther pleads with her husband, King Ahasuerus, to prevent the killing of the Jews, her people.

Adelina Patti (1843-1919), Italian soprano, famed for playing Amina in La
Sonnambula,
by Vicenzo Bellini (1801-1835).

In Roman mythology, the goddess of the hunt.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Petrarch (1304-1374), Italian poets.

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) and Fra Angelico (c. 1400-1455), Italian painters.

Randolph Rogers (1825-1892), American sculptor whose statuettes were popular household decorations.

In Greek mythology, character who predicts the future but is never believed.

The prints are of famous paintings.

the elegant knife-cases are by Thomas Sheraton (1751-1806), English designer.

Boucicault (1820-1890) was a writer of popular melodramas.

Character in an etching by English artist William Hogarth (1697-1764).

Comedy by Eugène Labiche (1815-1888), often read in French classes.

Sonnets from the Portuguese
is a collection of love poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), wife of the poet Robert Browning (1812-1889), whose “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Alix” was often memorized by schoolchildren.

Local African Americans, often former slaves, were commonly hired as servants.

Wedding march by German composer George Frideric Handel (1685-1759).

Symphony by German composer Louis Spohr (1784-1859).

Traditional wedding march by German composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847). Wharton mentions three famous wedding marches in this novel.

Pioneering English fashion designer Charles Worth (1825-1895) became a founder of haute couture in Paris.

British prep school.

Brothers Edmond (1822-1896) and Jules (1830-1870) de Goncourt were French writers who ran a salon; Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) was considered France’s greatest short story writer; Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870) was a well-known French author.

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), French writer, author of Madame Bovary.

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891), French artist.

Mary France Scott Siddons (1844-1890), well-known English actress, performing Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem.

Cowes, on England’s Isle of Wight, is a yachting resort; Baden is a German town renowned for its thermal baths.

Private room (French).

Small desk.

In mythology, a monster with live serpents for hair; anyone who looked at a Gorgon turned to stone.

Jules Michelet (1798-1874), French historian of the French Revolution.

English actress (1846-1880), famous for playing Juliet.

Duke Charles-August de Morny (1811-1865), French speculator who aided a coup d‘état that made his half brother Emperor Napoleon III; he became a deputy of France.

Eugène Verboeckhoven (1798-1881), Belgian painter.

Henry Poole, well-known tailor on London’s Savile Row.

The typewriter had been invented in various forms.

Club devoted to the collecting and preservation of finely made books.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918), French composer.

Name of a convent school in Paris. Marguerite in Gounod’s
Faust
is assumed into heaven, as was the Virgin Mary in Catholic doctrine.

Titian (1488/90-1576), great Venetian School painter during the Italian Renaissance.

Jules Hardouin-Mansard (1646-1708), French architect favored by Louis XIV.