Moving Grand Finales

I have been remiss in providing the answers to the pop quiz inspired by Captain Kirk's letting his girlfriend get run over by a car. Apologies.

The accomplished French critic Roland Barthes was struck by a van delivering dry cleaning in the fifth arrondissement of Paris. I’ve been told, but am not certain, that it happened on the Rue Lagrange, leading up to Place Maubert-Mutualité. On February 25, 1980, he left a lunch hosted by François Mitterrand and was walking home when the incident occurred. He died a few weeks later at the age of 64. A great loss.

Dancer and champion bohemian Isadora Duncan had a flowing, hand-painted silk scarf around her neck on the night of September 14, 1927. On the seaside corniche in Nice, she got into the sports car of her putative lover, a mechanic named Benoît Falchetto, and bade her entourage a florid farewell. When he roared off, her scarf became entangled in the open spokes of the right rear wheel, snapping her neck. She was 50.

In his later years, Antoní Gaudi had become an unkempt, spiritual monomaniac, living in the crypt of the construction site of La Sagrada Familia (aka, Our Lady of the Smurfs). On June 7, 1927, while walking ragged and haggard near the church, he was hit by a streetcar. Believing him to be a homeless derelict, the police brought Gaudi to a paupers’ hospital, where he died three days later, at age 73.

King Henry I of Jerusalem (aka, Count Henry II of Champagne) fell out of a window at his palace in Acre (aka, Akko, Israel) on September 10, 1197. He was 31. He is thought to have leaned too heavily on the lattice, and was then knocked further off balance by a dwarf named Scarlet, who, in trying to help, only ensured that both of them fell to their deaths. There is a certain falling-to-death irony in his demise: a few years earlier, Henry is supposed to have visited the Assassin stronghold near Masyaf, Syria, where their leader instructed two of his men to jump to their deaths to show the visiting Christian dignitary how serious they were in seeking an alliance with the Crusaders to crush the Sunnis of Damascus and Aleppo.

Elezear Maccabeus was the younger brother of Judas Maccabeus, the leader of the great Maccabean revolt of the Jews against the Seleucid Empire (aka, the Greeks). Elezear, during the Battle of Beth-Zecharia of 162 BCE, crept under a magnificently caparisoned war elephant – leading him to believe it the mount of an important official – then stabbed it in the belly with his spear. The dying animal collapsed. Thus our man was killed by a falling elephant. We don’t know Elezear’s age or the elephant’s at the moment of this encounter.

Ra Ra Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen, there was a cat that really was gone. Ra Ra Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine, it was a shame how he carried on… Ahem... Although there is some dispute over the exact details, it is thought that a group of Russian aristos fed Rasputin cyanide-laced cakes on the night of December 29, 1916 (aka, December 16, by the Tsar’s calendar) in Saint Petersburg. When that didn’t work, someone shot him in the neck. The conspirators left and when they returned to dispose of the body, they found him alive and angry – so they shot him three more times in the back and stabbed and beat him. Greatly weakened but still kicking, Rasputin was then tied up and chucked into the icy waters of the Neva River, where he eventually expired. He was 47.

On May 13, 1935, motorcycle enthusiast Thomas Edward Lawrence (aka, Lawrence of Arabia) took his beloved Brough Superior SS100 for a ride in hilly Dorset. At the last moment catching sight of two boys on bicycles, he swerved to avoid hitting them and crashed his motorbike into a hedgerow. He went sailing over the handlebars. He died six days later, at age 46.