Silvio Berlusconi the end of April 2009, Berlusconi's wife Veronica Lario, who would divorce him several years later, wrote an open letter expressing her anger at Berlusconi's choice of young, attractive female candidates—some with little or no political experience—to represent the party in the 2009 European Parliament elections. Berlusconi demanded a public apology, claiming that for the third time his wife had "done this to me in the middle of an election campaign", and stated that there was little prospect of his marriage continuing. On 3 May, Lario announced she was filing for divorce. She claimed that Berlusconi had not attended his
The Marriage of Figaro (play) primae noctis, in which he would consummate the marriage with the bride-to-be prior to Figaro's honeymoon. The scholar and translator John Wood writes that the play was probably completed in more or less its existing form by 1778. It was accepted for production by the management of the Comédie Française in 1781, after which three years elapsed before it was publicly staged. Initially the text was approved, with minor changes, by the official censor, but at a private reading before the French court the play so shocked King Louis XVI that he forbade its public presentation. Beaumarchais revised the text,