1. Queen Victoria – forty years. Prince Albert died in 1861; she
in 1901. 2. Empress Eugénie died in 1920, fifty years after her
husband, Napoleon III, was overthrown. He had died in
Chislehurst, Kent, in 1873. 3. Cosima Wagner (1837–1930), the
daughter of Franz Liszt and dominating guiding spirit of
Bayreuth, died in 1930, outliving her husband, Richard, by
forty-eight years. Their son, Siegfried, died in the same year,
at sixty-one. 4. Adele Strauss, the widow of Johann Strauss,
died in 1930, outliving her husband by thirty-one years. Brahms
had scribbled on her fan the first three notes of The Blue
Danube, “Regrettably not by me.” Johann called the chambermaid
in Die Fledermaus Adele. 5. Geneviève Strauss survived the
composer Georges Bizet, her first husband, by fifty-one years.
He had died in 1875 at the age of thirty-six of a sudden heart
attack, three months after his opera, Carmen, was first
performed. They had been married for six years, interrupted by a
short separation. In 1886, she married Emile S