Eliza Lynch: Queen of Paraguay

By Michael Lillis and Ronan Fanning

Escaping a desperate marriage at the age of 20, Eliza Lynch fled Ireland to Paris where her extraordinary beauty and intelligence won the attention of the soon-to-be dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano López.
Although the couple never married, Eliza bore him seven children and was seen as the queen of Paraguay, adored by the public and admired for her glamour and sophistication. But Eliza and Francisco's love was damned with the outbreak of the infamous War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), the bloodiest in South America's history.
This is a unique love story, chronicling a romance that endured a desperate turn of fortunes, taking them from a life of royalty to a life on the run, and culminating with the now iconic image of Lynch burying both López and their eldest son in a shallow grave with her bare hands after they had been killed by Brazilian troops.
Dubbed The Irish Evita, Eliza Lynch (born in Charleville, County Cork) was the most famous woman in all of South America in the nineteenth century. Her reputation was destroyed by the opposition in the wake of the War of the Triple Alliance; but in this story of wealth, war, love, loyalty, loss and, above all, survival, Eliza is revealed as a woman who showed extraordinary courage in the face a series of unspeakable horrors.
The authors have discovered the truth about Eliza's Irish origins and the cruel deception of her marriage at the age of sixteen to a duplicitous French Army officer. They reconstruct the systematic invention of her image as a prostitute around her first meeting with Solano López in Paris in 1854.
Eliza Lynch was a courageous woman who was adored by the ordinary women of Paraguay and who tried to help many victims of an appalling war. The paranoid López, on discovering that his family and colleagues had been conspiring against him, trusted only Eliza and their relationship became a love story of the damned. The book reveals why the Emperor of Brazil, against the advice of his generals, pursued López to his death in 1870; Eliza buried him and their eldest son in the jungle with her bare hands.
Eliza defied her enemies in a pamphlet she published in 1875 – here translated for the first time – when she returned to face her enemies in Paraguay. The authors' exclusive access to the unpublished journals of Eliza's daughter-in-law shows how scurrilous writers in South America, Britain and the US finally broke her spirit and how she died a 'burnt-out case' in Paris in 1886. In 1961 a later dictator, General Stroessner, declared her the national heroine of Paraguay.
This book restores her to her rightful place among the most remarkable and brave women in modern history.
Now a subject of a new Irish documentary by Alan Gilsenan, the film that helps rescue one of the great Irish lives of the 19th century from obscurity while opening a fascinating window onto what is perhaps South America's least-known country and the apocalyptic conflagration that still haunts its society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gill Books
• Release date: Sep 11, 2009
• ISBN: 9780717162796

Michael Lillis

Michael Lillis is a former diplomat who played a leading role in negotiating the Anglo-Irish Agreement on Northern Ireland of 1985. For the past two decades he has pursued business interests in South America.

Book preview

ELIZA LYNCH

Queen of Paraguay

MICHAEL LILLIS

& RONAN FANNING

Gill & Macmillan

PRAISE FOR ELIZA LYNCH: QUEEN OF PARAGUAY

‘History, particularly in South America, is written by the victors, and Lillis and Fanning have done a good job to sift through the half-truths and revisions that make Eliza Lynch’s story something of a rollercoaster ride. Written in an accessible, no-nonsense, style, it’s refreshing to read a book on Lynch that refuses to pander to gossip.’

Sunday Tribune

‘This book is a fascinating account, meticulously researched.’

The Irish Times

‘Michael Lillis and Ronan Fanning together have penned what is finally a definitive account.’

Sunday Independent

PRAISE FOR THE SPANISH EDITION, CALUMNIA

‘An excellent addition to the history of Paraguay; a new starting point in the search for the truth.’

Jorge Rubiani, leading Paraguayan historian,

Última Hora

PRAISE FOR THE PORTUGUESE EDITION, CALUNIA

‘Lillis and Fanning confront the complicated problems of the sources in Ireland, England, France, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil with extreme rigour and rare honesty, producing the best and best documented biography of Eliza Lynch.’

Elias Thomé Saliba, leading Brazilian historian,

Estado de São Paulo

In Memoriam

Comandante Rolim Adolfo Amaro

15.9.1942–8.7.2001

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Praise for Eliza Lynch: Queen of Paraguay

Dedication

Foreword to the Second Edition

Prologue

Chapter 1: The Hunt for Eliza Lynch

Chapter 2: Monsieur Quatrefages and Mrs Quatrefages

Chapter 3: Was she a Courtesan?

Chapter 4: Enter Panchito

Chapter 5: Paraguay—Mohammed’s Paradise

Chapter 6: The Queen of Paraguay

Chapter 7: Triumph

Chapter 8: Disaster

Chapter 9: Inferno

Chapter 10: Cerro Corá

Chapter 11: In the Edinburgh Courts

Chapter 12: The Last Betrayal: Return to Asunción

Chapter 13: ‘A Heart Grown Cold’

Appendix: Elisa Lynch, Expocisión y Protesta

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Reference Notes

Select Bibliography

List of Maps

Copyright

About the Authors

About Gill & Macmillan

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

In November 1864 Francisco Solano López instigated the tragic Paraguayan war by seizing a Brazilian naval ship on the Paraguay River and invading Matto Grosso. By January 1869 the Triple Alliance of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay had destroyed the army and navy of Paraguay and occupied Asunción and much of the country. The Commander-in-Chief of the Alliance, Brazil’s greatest Captain, the Duque de Caxias, had told the Emperor already in 1868 that Brazil’s honour had been vindicated; and he returned to Brazil on 19 January 1869. The Emperor Dom Pedro II, a gentle and scholarly man, tragically and unnecessarily did not accept Caxias’ advice to end the War.

Instead there followed a year of devastation under the command of the Emperor’s son-in-law, the cruel Comte d’Eu, a scion of the House of Orléans. The war ended with the death of López and his eldest son at Cerro Corá on 1 March 1870. Eliza Lynch buried them both with her bare hands. By then, over ninety per cent of the men and boys and over fifty per cent of the women and girls of Paraguay had died of violence, disease and starvation. Paraguay, one of the most advanced countries in South America before the war, had been driven back to the Stone Age. It has not since recovered its earlier relative prosperity. This dark chapter remains an open wound in the memory of the Paraguayan people and of many noble Brazilians such as the visionary and much lamented Comandante Rolim Amaro.

A similar and in some ways even darker memory has haunted the relations between Britain and Ireland. For 800 years Britain, a world power, occupied and ruled her smaller neighbour. The epitome of cruelty came with Britain’s refusal to help the Irish in the first years of the Great Famine of 1846–9, when over a million starved to death and two million were forced to emigrate to the United States, many in the infamous ‘coffin ships’ of the day. The British Minister in charge of ‘relief’, Sir Charles Trevelyan, said: ‘The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated . . . The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.’

The horror of those events remains live for the Irish and their descendants all over the world. Britain never apologised until June 1997 when the Prime Minister Tony Blair sent a message to a Famine Commemoration in Eliza’s native County Cork: ‘The famine was a defining event in the history of Ireland and Britain. It has left deep scars. That one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today. Those who governed in London at the time failed their people.’ This was an act of courage and high statesmanship. One year later Mr Blair and the Irish Prime Minister and the leaders of the divided community in Northern Ireland signed the Good Friday Agreement which brought peace to Northern Ireland after thirty years of violence and hatred.

There is an opportunity here for an act of high, generous and imaginative statesmanship, like Mr Blair’s, which would confirm the undoubted role of Brazil as a beacon of tolerance, sensitivity and generosity for all of Latin America, the developing world and the entire United Nations. This would undo much hurt and create a new and inspiring platform for the reconciliation of the great peoples of Brazil and Paraguay.

Michael Lillis

PROLOGUE

There is no more desolate place than Cerro Corá, a bleak amphitheatre of mountains near Paraguay’s modern border with Brazil.

On 1 March 1870 Eliza Lynch was here. Her lover, the father of their seven children, Francisco Solano López, to the world the dictator of Paraguay, to Eliza her Panchito, had just been lanced and gunned down by the Brazilian soldiery. Their eldest and best-loved son, also Panchito, aged 15, had tried to defend his mother. Despite her remonstrating screams he had refused to surrender to the Brazilians. He died in her arms.

Eliza buried them both with her bare hands. She later told her daughter-in-law that she was dressed in her last remaining outfit, a worn and ragged ballgown and broken dancing shoes.

The soldiers danced around the death scene. They jeered Eliza with ribald derision and roared their triumphant joy. Understandably: they had won the final battle of the War of the Triple Alliance, one of the most horrific conflicts in all history, and they could at last go home.

We were here 130 years later, on 8 July 2001. Cerro Corá was as desolate as ever. Miguel Candia, our friend and the co-pilot of the somewhat elderly Cessna Caravan aircraft that brought us from Asunción, had sternly warned me earlier that Eliza had brought only misfortune to anyone who sought to disturb her bones. He insisted I keep and meditate deeply on a large black-and-white photograph of Cerro Corá he had taken on a sunny day years before. When developed it could have been the backdrop for the witches’ scene in Macbeth—dank, grotesque and menacing. I occasionally look at it. ‘Stay away from that woman,’ he counselled. Yet, as it happened, he himself was drawn to Cerro Corá.

The previous night we had enjoyed a farewell party in our hotel to thank the many Paraguayan friends who had helped us in our hunt for Eliza Lynch. The mayor of Asunción, Martín Burt, and his distinguished lawyer brother Esteban, both history buffs, were there, with descendants of the protagonists of the war—historians, archivists, journalists and the curious. The talk was about Eliza: as ever in Paraguay, opinions were passionately divided.

Marta, the delightful Paraguayan wife of Thomas Whigham, the leading American historian of the War of the Triple Alliance, is a seasoned and—I was told—a gifted palm reader. I was delighted when she started to see the lineaments of sensuality in my lifeline. ‘Read on,’ I urged. Suddenly she stopped, stood up and walked away. I scarcely noticed her reaction: I was, as they say, in flying form, excited by our discoveries about Eliza’s background over the previous 10 days and by the prospect of visiting Cerro Corá next morning. I had also, I must admit, already enjoyed a somewhat unwise quantity of caña, the glowing sugar-cane rum of the country.

The idea of this project had first stirred in my mind 10 years earlier. I had been in Asunción leasing a DC-10-30 aircraft to the Paraguayan government-owned national airline, LAPSA, with the help of our very expert local legal adviser, Esteban Burt. I worked for what was then the world’s leading aircraft leasing group, Tony Ryan’s GPA, based in Shannon in the west of Ireland. When the contract negotiations concluded, my colleague and friend Christy White and I were summoned to meet the then President of Paraguay, General Rodríguez. The usual courtesies done, he asked us: ‘What do they say in Ireland about our national heroine?’ I had no idea what he was talking about, but I did my best (I had been, for what it’s worth, a diplomat in my country’s service for 20 years). ‘It is a subject of intense interest, Excellency,’ I replied. As soon as we left the Palace, I said to Esteban: ‘Who is the national heroine of this country?’ ‘Well, of course it’s—according to some—Eliza Lynch, the Irishwoman and lover of Solano López. I assumed you knew.’ We did not. We had never heard of Eliza Lynch. Christy and I had to take our leave of Esteban and rush immediately to the airport: we had no opportunity to pursue Eliza further and there were no books on sale in those days at Asunción International.

That weekend I returned to Ireland and visited, as was my habit, the United Arts Club on Fitzwilliam Street in Dublin. On Saturday nights, along with several groups of soi-disant writers and artists, I used to take refuge there around midnight from the restrictive curfews that then prevailed in our city’s pubs. For once I was activated by genuine intellectual curiosity, rather than my usual yen for carousal. A particular corner of the bar was regularly occupied by seven men in their sixties and seventies who had, as I knew, genuine academic and literary authority and who sought each other out on Saturday nights. I told them my story. ‘Have any of you heard of this woman?’ No one had.

Three days later I received an envelope at my office in Shannon with the card of the late Tomás de Bhaldraithe, the very erudite Professor of Modern Irish at University College Dublin and the editor of the principal English–Irish dictionary. He was one of the seven wise men. Also in the envelope was a slim volume, The World’s Wickedest Women by Margaret Nicholas, published in London in 1984. There she was, Eliza Lynch, in the grisly company of Lucretia Borgia, Ulrike Meinhoff, Catherine the Great, her fellow Irishwoman Lola Montez and five other she-devils. Eliza Lynch was a whore, wrote Margaret Nicholas, and an insatiable thief, a torturer and assassin who had caused the War of the Triple Alliance that eliminated the entire male population of Paraguay. Paraguay’s national heroine indeed!

I returned many times to Asunción in the early nineties to manage and lease airplanes and to pursue my growing curiosity about Eliza. And also because, through Eliza, I had fallen under the spell of Paraguay’s tragic history. This may have had to do with the instinctive reactions of an Irishman to the trials of a small country bullied for centuries by its larger neighbours and decimated in a life-or-death struggle for independence. Those were precisely the reactions of the Irish General Martin McMahon, distinguished by the Congressional Medal of Honor in the American Civil War, who was US minister to Paraguay in the months before that last battle at Cerro Corá. I was also learning that the story of Eliza herself was a lot more complicated than Margaret Nicholas’ simple account of villainy suggested. I decided I would try to understand these complexities and, if possible, tell her story, warts and all.

So it was that on 27 June 2001 there assembled in Asunción for a 10-day working seminar a team of historians and archivists, specialists in Irish, British, French, Brazilian, Argentinian, American and above all Paraguayan sources, to see if we could get at the truth about the life and times of Eliza Lynch. A number of us had been preparing for months and had already started to make some surprising preliminary discoveries about her.

Ronan Fanning is the co-author of this book, Professor Emeritus of Modern History at University College Dublin, author of several key works on the relationships between Britain and Ireland (if anything, as intricate and as unhappy as those between Paraguay and her bigger neighbours Brazil and Argentina) and a close friend for many years. He had begun the task of finding Eliza’s Irish origins, which hitherto had been a matter of no more than random guesswork (many biographers even held she was English or Scottish). He had already spent weeks trawling the archives of the British Foreign Office and the Edinburgh courts: in due course these would yield a treasure trove of hitherto ignored direct witness evidence by and about Eliza.

Alberto Duarte, ‘Tito’, a brilliant and indefatigable Paraguayan archivist and friend of Esteban Burt’s, had already burrowed through every corner of the Paraguayan National Archives and the entire Paraguayan literature, published and unpublished, from before and after the war. Most of the archives that existed at that time had been seized by the Brazilian army. A further difficulty was that Eliza, for all her power and influence with the dictator Solano López, was never mentioned in any official Paraguayan document, a strange circumstance that we shall have to try to explain as we go along. Tito proved ingenious at interpreting the various ‘silences’ in the official records about Eliza by analysing them in counterpoint with existing accounts from unofficial witnesses in ways that won us key insights. He became the dear friend of all of us and I was privileged to know his wife and children outside the world of our research. We were heartbroken to hear of Tito’s death five years ago.

David Kerr is an author and scholar specialising in French literary and social history in the nineteenth century. His investigation of the French military records of the career of Xavier Quatrefages, Eliza’s French ‘husband’, provided perhaps our most dramatic discovery of all in the psychological history of Eliza’s tumultuous life.

Ricardo Maranhao, Professor of Modern History at Unicamp (outside São Paulo), was our main Brazilian witness and point of reference. He provided fascinating insights into the profound effects of the war on the then Brazilian Empire, Brazil’s enormous slave population, the military and the cultural history of his country, including the contemporary Brazilian perceptions of Eliza. He found several unpublished important references to her in the Brazilian archives. He is an acknowledged gourmand and culinary expert and a fountain of enthralling anecdote: he added hugely to the substance as well as to the fun of our endeavours.

Esteban Burt and I became friends in Asunción in 1989. A promoter of micro-enterprise for Paraguay’s lower-income population and a committed environmentalist, his two other passions are South American history and the game of rugby. He captained his country’s team and later in 1994 brought a squad of under-18s from Asunción to Limerick, where, one wet Sunday morning, they defeated their opposite numbers of mighty Garryowen, ‘for us an epic victory’. For some years this Harvard-educated international lawyer has guided the authors around and through the thickets of Paraguay’s extremely controversial history, rescuing us from many solecisms, yet never imposing his views and swallowing hard at our occasionally debatable interpretations (an example: the paternity and birth of Francisco Solano López).

Comandante Rolim Amaro founded the two airlines, TAM and TAM Mercosur, which were the largest respectively in Brazil and Paraguay. He adored Eliza Lynch: to him she was glamorous, gutsy, intelligent and simply irresistible. The rest of us had and still have some reservations about her; Rolim had none. He and I had been good friends for years. He was literally the most fantastic character I ever met. An ardent Brazilian patriot, he also loved Paraguay (this was and continues to be most unusual) and was exceptionally aware of the sense of historic injury that Paraguayans still harbour since their country was destroyed. Rolim, for all his overwhelming business preoccupations, was a passionate intellectual and amateur historian. His collection of original documents and first editions of the earliest books on the war was extraordinary; what was even more remarkable was that he had read them and could cite them at length.

He was probably the main inspiration for my persisting in my own hunt for Eliza. His enthusiasm, once the idea took root, was limitless. He arranged to have his Paraguayan musician friends record the music which Eliza is believed to have brought to Paraguay and which is today part of its folk heritage. He wanted to make documentaries for Brazilian and Paraguayan television. He thought the story would make an exotic and salutary Brazilian novela or soap-opera: probably he was right.

Rolim was also the reason I abandoned the project for several years.

An anecdote may give the reader a sense of his personality. Occasionally of an afternoon, after a rousing but decisive business lunch, he and I would go on a drinking spree, careering in his pick-up truck round São Paulo, usually to the favelas, where he seemed to be known and liked. One afternoon was spent in an old two-seater US warplane ‘buzzing’ the palatial homes of his business peers. Another time we were in his truck and he suddenly remembered that he had an absolutely crucial engagement: he was already late for the presentation of their wings to his graduating class of air stewardesses. We raced headlong to the venue, arriving as an entire orchestra was thunderously rendering the National Anthem. Up went the curtain to reveal 60 gorgeous young women clad in, let us say, the sort of revealing evening dress that only young Brazilian beauties can or should dare to wear. Applause from their families, many of them in tears. The curtain fell and in minutes was raised again to the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to show the graduating class in their smart TAM uniforms. Deafening and prolonged applause.

I was sitting at the dais between the Deputy Governor of the State of São Paulo and the Archbishop as Rolim started his speech. He himself was not a thing of beauty, but all he ever had to do was walk into a room and his magical energy and charm had every young goddess—and every other woman—at his feet, to the consternation of all other heterosexual males present. I was relaxed and fuzzy with the cachaca we had been drinking and only dimly grasped that he said the following: ‘Dear friends: we have had many distinguished friends on these wonderful occasions—great artists, singers, writers—but today we have our most distinguished guest of honour of all. Today I present to you my old friend Michael Lillis, the former president of Ireland! Michael is more than a politician, he is also a renowned love poet . . .’ and he proceeded to intone stanzas in Portuguese ‘translation’ which I only half understood, but which were clearly as richly erotic in content as only Brazilian love poets can get away with. I don’t know what I tried to say to that wonderful audience; the memory of the occasion is a constant source of nightmarish embarrassment. That was my friend Rolim.

Early on the morning of 8 July our group of researchers was at Asunción Airport in time to board the Caravan plane that Rolim had provided to take our party to Cerro Corá. He had been with us in the earlier days of the seminar but had been obliged to return to São Paulo. The plan was that he would meet us at 9:30 at Cerro Corá, coming across the mountain terrain on one of his many Harley Davidsons from his ranch at Punta Pora on the Brazilian side of the border (on land which Eliza had claimed!). We would then all return to his ranch for lunch and then proceed to São Paulo. Tom Whigham, the American historian, and his son had been invited to join us, but as he did not appear and as Rolim was unusually punctual (for a Brazilian: the same low standard of punctuality could be held against most of us Irish), I decided we should take off without our American friend. I learned during the 90-minute flight that the reason he had not shown up was that his wife had told him that she had seen a clear signal of death when examining my hand the previous evening and had insisted that he and his son should stay on terra firma.

There is no runway for aircraft to land at Cerro Corá. Just a bare uneven surface cut out of the forest: the more even land lower down is at times a swamp. I was sitting in the first passenger row and could see ahead through the open cockpit as clearly as the pilots. Just as our wheels were touching the hillside, a cloud of dust rose and out of it a flock of ostriches came straight at the plane. I have never been superstitious but, as I tried to brace for what seemed likely to be the end, I admit that Marta’s dire sortilège possessed my imagination. Miguel Candia and Tomás, his companion pilot, somehow managed a bumpy landing as the ostriches raced alongside without damaging engines, wheels or wings and we ground to a stop.

We were surprised that Rolim was not there because we were already a little late. There was no phone or radio communication with anywhere from Cerro Corá, so we concluded that it was likely that he had been detained by business or other pressing problems and we decided to make our tour of the battlefield.

The photographs we took of our group as we toured the key historic points of the silent, barren desolation that was Cerro Corá that day—the execution sites of López and his son, the burial ground that immortalised Eliza as the maternal presence at Paraguay’s Golgotha (that is, for the supporters of López)—show a group that had regained its smiling self-possession. Speaking just for myself, I am sure that that was no more than superficial.

About two hours later we decided to fly on to Rolim’s ranch across the border. We were relieved that our sturdy Caravan revved up a storm and we took off in good order. Ten minutes later we landed on the ranch runway, where several Cessna jet aircraft were parked.

I shall always remember being the first to step down on the tarmac and seeing Miguel, whom I knew slightly, coming towards me from the house in his majordomo’s white jacket. He was weeping. ‘The Comandante is dead,’ he said. ‘Rolim died in a helicopter crash inside Paraguay. The police have just told us.’ That moment is frozen in my memory.

It was utterly typical of the man: yes, our surmise that he had been detained by business was correct, but such was his mania for punctuality and for the laws of hospitality that he could not bear to keep us waiting. Instead of coming over to Cerro Corá by motorbike, he took out his brand-new Robinson 3-44 helicopter, on which he was being trained by a Colonel of the Spanish Air Force, but which he was not yet certified to fly without an instructor. Somehow that too was typical. Some minutes after takeoff the machine crashed inside the Paraguayan border just by the town of Pedro Juan Caballero. Rolim was killed instantly. He was 58 years old. Tragically, Patricia Santos, a very kind secretary in his office, who at Rolim’s request had made many of the arrangements for our visit to Paraguay, was also killed.

That night I accompanied his body on one of the family Cessnas, piloted by Rolim’s son Mauricio, to São Paulo’s downtown airport. The entire staff of TAM was waiting. They were all at the graveside next day with the leadership of Brazil’s business and political class and of the world’s aviation industry. His fleet of F100s and A320s and A330s flew over. Most stunning of all were the mobs of slum dwellers wrapped in the treasured Brazilian flags they brandish only on great Brazilian World Cup nights: none of them had ever been in an airplane or ever would be. Their attitude was somehow aggressively proprietorial: ‘Rolim belongs to US!’ It turned out that Rolim, unknown to almost everyone, used to spend several nights a week in the favelas of Brazil, encouraging the young to emulate his own example and success. They loved him. He was a great man.

For weeks I was stricken. Rolim had died coming to meet us at Cerro Corá. What an unpardonable waste of a truly good man. My many friends at TAM assured me that I should not feel responsible for what had happened. Rolim had joyously wanted to be part of the Eliza project. That was true. But I could not shake off the conviction that we had unintentionally, but in the end foolishly and self-indulgently, somehow robbed his family, his wonderful wife, Noemi, and his children, María Claudia, Mauricio and Marcos, of a great husband and father and that Brazil, and especially the huge abandoned underclass of that country, had lost someone utterly essential to their future. In that scale Eliza seemed insignificant. I confess I turned against her for a while and saw some raw if unreasonable sense in Miguel Candia’s strictures about not meddling with her bones.

Months and years passed. My friends sometimes would ask how the Eliza Lynch book was going. I would grunt in reply. A number of books were published about her in English, all of them in one degree or another hostile and factually inaccurate. In the end it was my friend and fellow author Ronan who pointed out that if Rolim’s death laid any responsibility on us and especially on me, who called myself his old friend, it was that we had a clear duty to write and publish the book that Rolim had died trying to help us write. He was spot on. I was ashamed I hadn’t thought that through for myself.

Our book is dedicated to his memory and to the cause that he espoused—and vigorously supported with his own energy and investments—of reconciling the great peoples of Paraguay and Brazil.

Michael Lillis

January 2009

Chapter 1

THE HUNT FOR ELIZA LYNCH

Who was Eliza Lynch? Eliza Lynch, ‘La Irlandesa’, the ‘Irishwoman’—Eliza Lynch was the lover and closest confidante of Marshal Francisco Solano López, President and dictator of Paraguay. They met in Paris in 1854: Eliza was 20 and just separated from a French military officer whom she had married when she was 16. She followed López to Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, in 1855 with their first child. They had seven children. Until López succeeded his father in 1862, Eliza was reviled by Asunción’s high society as the ‘Parisian harlot’. She created her own version of the Parisian society of the Second Empire in Asunción and her influence on Paraguayan music and architecture still persists.

In 1864 Francisco Solano López triggered the War of the Triple Alliance between Paraguay and the combined forces of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, by far the most destructive conflict in South America’s history. Land-locked Paraguay lost over 90 per cent of its male population aged seven and older,¹ as well as half of its women and younger children. Many believed that Eliza had inspired the unprovoked attacks on Paraguay’s gigantic neighbours, Brazil and Argentina. Until the war Paraguay was the most technologically advanced country in the region: by 1870 it had virtually returned to the Stone Age. The now paranoid López had tortured and killed hundreds of his own closest followers in the last years of the war; he trusted Eliza alone and she managed his mania with skill and devotion. Again and again she could have escaped, but she remained with him to the end. On 1 March 1870 López was killed by the Brazilian army at the last battle of the war, at Cerro Corá. Eliza was protecting her children a little distance away. The exulting shouts of the enemy soldiers told her everything. Her eldest son was then killed in her immediate presence. She buried both of them with her own hands. Eliza was taken prisoner by the Brazilians and took refuge in Europe, where she lived on in modest comfort until 1886 on the funds she had smuggled out in the final phase of the war.

Eliza Lynch was the most famous and most notorious woman in nineteenth-century South American history. She is the centrepiece of a vast literature in Spanish and Portuguese of biographies, novels, historical studies, hundreds of pages of newspaper coverage and scurrilous and vituperative cartoons. She was the subject of diplomatic reports to Washington, London and Paris, to the Emperor of Brazil and the President of Argentina. Even her enemies conceded that she was beautiful, glamorous and sensual. She lived at the epicentre of one of the most devastating cataclysms of the modern age, for which, in the view of her enemies, she was in no small measure responsible.

For two generations Eliza and her lover (they never married) were depicted as the destroyers of Paraguay. By the 1920s López became transformed into the heroic martyr, the defender of Paraguayan freedom, and Eliza was celebrated for her selfless love of her adopted country.

BIRTH AND ORIGINS

What were the origins of this extraordinary woman? Or, as a bemused congressman asked Martin T. McMahon, American Civil War general and Minister to Paraguay in 1868–69, during his cross-examination in Washington before the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1870, ‘Who is Mrs Lynch?’ ‘She is a lady of Irish parentage, of English birth, and of French education.’² ‘How old is Eliza Lynch?’ asked the opening sentence of her first biography, which was published in the same year.³ When we launched this project 130 years later, the answers to these basic questions remained wreathed in the myth and legend that surrounded Eliza Lynch throughout her life and after her death. None of her later biographers, or the many other historians who had written about her, knew where or when she was born; nor could they identify her parents.

Map 1. Eliza’s European world. (Vallandro Keating)

I never heard a reference to the childhood of Madame Lynch. Her life in Paraguay appears to have erased her other life or to have made her forget. Her life story begins when she was eighteen years old.⁴

So wrote Maud Lloyd Solano López, who married Enrique, the eldest of Eliza’s surviving sons, in 1882 in London, where as a young teenager she had first met her future mother-in-law after the end of the Paraguayan war. This mystery surrounding the early life of Eliza Lynch, whether a product of reticence or forgetfulness, was compounded by the conflict of evidence between the only surviving fragments