feature statues of his father, Frederick William, and his grandfather, Charles William Ferdinand, and that it should imitate the style of the 14th century Scaliger Tombs in Verona. Accordingly, a design was chosen by the Swiss architect Jean Franel. Sited on the Quai du Mont-Blanc, it is built in three storeys of white marble with a hexagonal canopy over a sarcophagus bearing a recumbent figure of the duke. At the projecting corners are marble statues of six notable ancestors of the House of Guelph by various sculptors, and a bronze equestrian statue of Duke William by the French sculptor Auguste Cain was originally mounted at the top of the spire. The monument stands on a platform 65 meters long and 25 meters wide and is guarded by marble chimeras and lions, also by Cain. The monument was unveiled on 14 October 1879; however, earthquake damage resulted in the removal of the equestrian statue to an adjacent plinth in 1883 and the top of the spire was rebuilt with a crown in 1890. The duke's estate amounted to 24 million Swiss Francs, two million of which were expended on the monument, the remainder was spent on a number of new public buildings, for example the Grand Théâtre. Legacy A contemporary obituarist referred to the Duke as "that painted, bewigged Lothario, whose follies, eccentricities, and diamonds made him the talk of Europe." During his lifetime he sued several newspaper publishers for libel when they alleged that, among other things, he solicited homosexual encounters. However, in 1849 he won a defamation case for the publication of an article by a newspaper, The Weekly Dispatch, in 1830, after sending a manservant to procure archive copies of the edition from the publishers and the British Museum. No copies now survive, although given the Duke's other legal cases, the nature of the libel may be assumed. However this case (Brunswick v Harmer) established a precedent in English defamation law, as the ruling was interpreted by courts to allow defamation plaintiffs to sue if there was a “new publication” of the original libel. It was used, for example, in 2009 to decree that internet company Google, who made historical libels available on their web pages, could be liable for damages. The multiple publication rule was finally curtailed in the UK by The Defamation Act 2013. Ancestors See also Charles was on the losing side of the Opera