quasi-widow

Updated: May 23, 2025

The Cruchotines made so much talk about the false position of the quasi-widow that she married her daughter very badly, and was forced to give up all hope of an alliance between Eugenie Grandet and her son. Adolphe joined his father in Paris and became, it was said, a worthless fellow. The Cruchots triumphed.

Honoré de Balzac - Eugenie Grandet

But there are few things more pathetic, I think, than the letters of this enthusiastic man to this cold woman; than the belief of Sismondi writing that the retrograde measures of which he reads in the papers give him fits of fever, that the post days on which he expects political news are days of frenzied expectation in the moral fibre, the faculty for indignation, of this pleasant, indifferent, cynical quasi-widow of Alfieri.

Vernon Lee - The Countess of Albany