Anne Dowriche of Anne du Bourg, a counselor in the Parliament of Paris who opposed using capital punishment for crimes of heresy. The third major event of the poem is a retelling of the bloody St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, an attack against Huguenots which began in Paris in 1572 and spread throughout France. Dowriche imagines the queen of France, the devoutly Catholic Catherine de Medici, fiercely proposing the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. While St. Bartholomew’s Massacre was a real series of events, Dowriche invented the detail that Catherine de Medici proposed the killings. Though Catherine de Medici is a villainous character
Katherine Anne Porter Fools" for $500,000). Producer David O. Selznick was after the film rights; but United Artists who owned the property, demanded $400,000. The novel was adapted for film by Abby Mann; producer and director Stanley Kramer featured Vivien Leigh in her final film performance. Despite Porter's claim that after the publication of "Ship of Fools " she would not win any more prizes in America, in 1966 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the U.S. National Book Award for "The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter". That year she was also appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.