Felix joseph barrias biography of abraham lincoln

A few decades ago, I had lunch with Daniel Carroll in Howard County, Maryland, during which he used a pop-up toaster in his grand dining room, which was hung with ancestral portraits. There were many such portraits, for Dan was a direct descendant of the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Doughoregan Manor has been a private residence since it was built in the early eighteenth century, although its family chapel was open to area Catholics in days when the Faith had been proscribed. After the Civil War, the chairs in the chapel, where the signer is buried, were purchased by a maternal antecedent during a trip to Paris when the Church of the Madeleine was being renovated. I never got to go back to Doughoregan, but Dan wrote to say that he was using the incense I had given him.

What matters here are those chairs, for they were used at the funeral of Chopin. The “Raphael of the piano,” as Heinrich Heine called him, had requested that Mozart’s Requiem be played at his obsequies; special permission was granted for female singers, who were concealed behind a black velvet curtain, which must have posed an acoustical challenge. Pauline Viardot, who had affectionately nursed Chopin in his last illness, sang the mezzo-soprano part

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