Disappointment at having lost her great court appointment made Doña Maria Manuela more determined than ever to find a splendid match for Eugenia, and she was ready to search all Europe for the right husband. She cannot have foreseen how long it would take, however, while unwisely she ignored the fact that her daughter had no particular wish to marry, having already discovered some very good reasons for distrusting men.
For anyone quite so proud and fastidious as the young Countess of Teba, it was another humiliation to be made to seem a vulgar, gold-digging fortune hunter who was being hawked around by a matchmaking mama. As Don Cipriano’s daughter, Doña Eugenia knew very well that she had no particular need of social position or money. She possessed a perfectly good title of her own – indeed she had several, including a duchy – while one day she was going to be an extremely rich heiress. She was not yet old enough to appreciate the cruel disadvantages of nineteenth-century spinsterhood.
As Eugenia said of Maria Manuela to an English friend many years later, when feeling old and charitable, ‘She wanted to make everybody happy, but in her own way, not in theirs.’ There were always potentially explosive tensions between mother and child, and especially at this time; it must have been very difficult for Eugenia to forgive Maria Manuela for deciding that Paca and not she should marry Alba. Even so, she admired her mother’s courage and determination.
In theory, since the Countess of Montijo and the Countess of Teba belonged to that close-knit international ruling class which in those days stretched from London to St Petersburg and from Stockholm to Naples, and whose common language was French, the doors of great houses in every European capital should have been open to them. No doubt, too, they expected to meet kindred spirits – some of whom might even be potential husbands – at all the fashionable spas and watering places. Yet in practice it turned out to be not quite so easy.
Leaving Spain, they first of all went back to Paris. From here in March 1849 Doña Eugenia wrote to Paca, saying that she had gone with Maria Manuela to a party given by Princesse Mathilde Bonaparte, ‘where I knew absolutely nobody. No one said a single word to me’. After the social triumphs of Madrid which she had always taken for granted, it was a new experience to be ignored by her own kind.
Eugenia adds:
I’m going to tell you something that will really make you laugh. The other day, when we were looking for an appartment we saw an enormous one in the Place Vendôme that appealed very much to Mamma, who said to me: “Don’t you see how well this would suit us, as we would be able to give receptions here.” You can imagine how I trembled. Mercifully we are now in a tiny appartment into which not more than ten people at most can fit, which helps to reassure me a little.
The story underlines the incompatibility between mother and daughter.
Paris had recently been shaken by a political earthquake whose tremors were felt by nearly every European government. In February 1848 the uninspiring monarchy of King Louis-Philippe had been unexpectedly swept away by the ‘Revolution of Contempt’, the king escaping from the Tuileries in a cab, with his whiskers shaved off and wearing dark glasses, to flee across the Channel under the name of ‘Mr Smith, an English tourist’. As Prosper Mérimée had written to Doña Maria Manuela at the time:
The Revolution was the work of 600 men, most of whom had no idea what they were doing or what they wanted. Now it has done its work. The little tradesmen who howled ‘Long live reform’ are saying today that it has ruined them. Government, opposition and National Guard each behaved with unbelievable stupidity. The only thing that we can do is try and keep some sort of authority and save whatever is left. While law and order have no doubt been restored and Paris is becoming her normal self again, you see very long faces everywhere. Bankruptcies are beginning to occur. There is immense uneasiness as people are living in fear of a future no one dares to predict.
The early months of the Second Republic had seen plenty of bloodshed. When the Paris mob rose in June, it was shot down mercilessly, 5,000 being killed and another 12,000 transported to Algeria. By the time Maria Manuela and Eugenia arrived, for the moment at least the new makeshift régime seemed to be in control but no one could say if it was going to last or whether the army would bring back the monarchy – many officers were staunch royalists.
Horrified by the reports of bloodshed and social upheaval that were coming out of the capital, throughout France the majority of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry hoped that the monarchy would return as soon as possible – many older people remembered the Terror very well, and also the financial chaos of the 1790s. What prevented any chance of a restoration, however, was the existence of two competing royalist parties, the Legitimists supporting the Comte de Chambord (‘Henry V’), the grandson of Charles X, deposed in 1830, and the Orleanists supporting the Comte de Paris (‘Philip VII’), Louis-Philippe’s grandson.
Desperate for firm rule, in December 1848 France elected an ersatz monarch in the person of Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who became the republic’s Prince President and installed himself in the Elysée. Mme Gordon’s sacred dream was beginning to look as though it might come true.
Only a few weeks after she arrived in Paris, Doña Maria Manuela secured an invitation to the Elysée for herself and her daughter, and in April 1849 they were presented by Prince Félix Bacciochi, the chef-de-protocol, to Louis-Napoleon. As someone who adored beautiful women, after chatting with Maria Manuela for a noticeably long time – normally he was a man of very few words – the Prince President then began to speak to her daughter. ‘Monseigneur’, Eugenia tactlessly informed him, ‘we have often talked about you with a lady who is truly devoted to your cause.’ ‘What is her name?’ ‘Mme Gordon.’ On hearing the name, Louis-Napoleon broke off the conversation hastily, and quickly moved on. Did the pretty young Spaniard with the red hair know that Eleonore Gordon had been his mistress? If so, why had she mentioned her to him? Was it some sort of invitation? Was she perhaps lascivious, like her queen in Madrid?
Some weeks later Maria Manuela and Eugenia received an invitation to dinner with the Prince President, not at the Elysée, but at the Palace of Saint-Cloud near Paris, where he was staying to escape from the midsummer heat, and also to take refuge from an alarming epidemic of cholera among the capital’s poorer classes. Thinking that this was going to be a large, formal party, the two ladies put on their most stately dresses and best jewellery.
Instead of taking them to the Palace of Saint-Cloud, however, the carriage sent to fetch them drew up at a small house in the park, over a mile from the palace. Here they found not the great gathering they expected but only Louis-Napoleon and Prince Bacciochi. The dinner for four dragged on in painful embarrassment through a long, hot summer evening. As soon as they rose their host took Eugenia’s arm, proposing a walk in the park, while Bacciochi took Maria Manuela’s. Quickly, Eugenia told Louis-Napoleon that he must escort her mother, who then insisted that she was feeling tired and demanded that the carriage should take them home at once.
Eugenia and Maria Manuela realised that the invitation had been a stratagem inspired by lechery. They immediately left Paris, moving to Brussels, escorted by the lovelorn Duke of Osuna, and then spent a few weeks at the smart Belgian watering place of Spa. Eugenia was always ‘taking the cure’, so frequently that one cannot help wondering if she was suffering from psychological problems, not unlikely in a young woman who was so highly strung. Certainly, she had not enjoyed her months abroad, and neither had Doña Maria Manuela. In September Eugenia wrote to Paca of their sense of isolation, of being in exile. ‘Instead of today [her mother’s birthday] being one of rejoicing and feasting, it was really very sad, to be so far way from you all…. At lunch Mamma and I did nothing but cry.’
In November they returned thankfully to Madrid, to Doña Maria Manuela’s accustomed round of dances and receptions, of visits to Queen Isabella at the Prado. The guests at a particularly successful fancy-dress ball held at Casa Ariza for the carnival of 1851 included over twenty august ladies of the highest rank, ranging from duchesses to countesses, together with all the Spanish cabinet ministers of the moment and most of the ambassadors to Madrid, but not Marshal Nárvaez, who had again fallen from power.
In April 1851 mother and daughter went abroad to London, in order to see the Great Exhibition. Here they ran into Nárvaez, accompanying him to a reception given by Lady Palmerston at her house in Carlton Gardens. A former foreign secretary, the Earl of Malmesbury recorded that at the reception he had seen ‘the Spanish beauty, Mademoiselle Montijo … very handsome, auburn hair, beautiful skin and figure’. He was especially impressed by ‘her lovely complexion’. During this visit to England Doña Eugenia and her mother also stayed with Ferdinand Huddleston, still besotted, at his country house in Cambridgeshire, Sawston Hall, where she enjoyed riding his horses over the flat dreary fields.
By July they were in Wiesbaden, yet another smart watering place, and which was also the capital of a tiny independent state, the duchy of Nassau, with its own miniature army of 5,000 men (one of those comical little German principalities of the sort that would one day be caricatured so uproariously by Offenbach in La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein). From Wiesbaden they travelled to Paris, but were only there for a few weeks, during which time they did not bother to call on the Prince President.
By the end of November they were back in Spain for the winter, remaining in Madrid until May the following year, when they drove across the frontier up into the French Pyrenees to take the cure again, at Eaux-Bonnes. The husband hunting was not being very successful. Doña Maria Manuela must have despaired at her daughter losing the chance of marriage to a man – or, rather, a duke – such as Osuna. Yet an even greater catch was not beyond the bounds of possibility.