from China via the Trans-Siberian railway, she from Switzerland. He arranged for Silvia to obtain Soviet citizenship; she immediately divorced her husband and married Jean Monnet. The idea for the Moscow marriage came from Dr. Ludwik Rajchman, whom Monnet had met during his time at the League of Nations (Rajchman was connected to the Soviet Ambassador to China, Dmitrij Bogomołow). It seems that the American and French ambassadors in Moscow, William Bullitt and Charles Alphand, also played a role. The custody of Anna was a problem; in 1935 Silvia took refuge with Anna in the Soviet consulate in Shanghai, where they were living at the time because Francisco Giannini was trying to obtain custody of the child. The legal battle was decided in favour of Silvia in 1937 in New York, but the ruling wasn't recognized by some other countries. In 1941 Monnet and Silvia had another daughter, Marianne. The Monnet family returned to France in 1945 and, after the death of Francisco Giannini in 1974, the couple married canonically in the cathedral of Lourdes. Silvia Monnet was very important to her husband throughout their forty-five years of marriage, according to Louis Joxe, Monnet "would spend hours writing to his wife, whose opinion mattered more to him than that of anyone else". Death and burial On 16 March 1979, Jean Monnet died at the age of 90 in his home in Houjarray, Bazoches-sur-Guyonne. His funeral took place in the church of Montfort-l'Amaury on 20 March 1979, with French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt both present. On , on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, his ashes were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris in a ceremony attended by numerous European heads of states and governments. Honors In 1953 Monnet was awarded the Karlspreis by the city of Aachen in recognition of his achievements. He received numerous other prizes and honorary degrees, including Doctor Honoris Causa from the universities of Cambridge (8 June 1961), Dartmouth (11 June 1961), Yale (12 June 1961), and Oxford (26 June 1963). He was an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1962) and the American Philosophical Society (1964). On 6 December 1963, he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with Special Distinction, by United States President Lyndon Johnson. The decision had been made by President Kennedy before his assassination. In 1972, Queen Elizabeth II made