The Lives of Eliza Lynch: Scandal and Courage by Michael Lillis and Ronan Fanning
Gill and Macmillan, £21.99
Here is a rattling good tale from South America, expertly told, one even capable of persuading the British to give up their traditional policy of doing anything for the region short of reading about it.
Though her story is unknown in the land of her birth, Eliza Lynch, an extraordinarily beautiful and attractive woman born at Charleville in County Cork, is the national heroine of Paraguay – the smallish country in the middle of the continent just to the left of Brazil and just to the right of Bolivia. The daughter of a doctor, she endeared herself to the poor of her adoptive country – though not to its oligarchy – when she was the companion (vulgo mistress) of its president Francisco “Panchito” Solano López in the middle of the 19th century.
Early in life she married a man in the French army medical service, Xavier Quatrefages, at Folkestone in 1850 and went off with him to Algeria, the North African territory which France was starting to absorb and settle – with disastrous consequences in the 20th century.
That marriage collapsed by 1853 and the following year her path crossed with López, the son of Carlos Antonio López, the fabulously rich ruler of Paraguay. Panchito was expending his father’s gold by the armload in an attempt to make his country into the most advanced nation in Latin America. Paraguay was arming itself in the arsenals of Britain, building one of the first railways in Latin America and sending the best and brightest Paraguayans for technical training in the Old World.
She herself disembarked from Europe at Asunción and brought to the unprepossessing little capital a whiff of European sophistication which Paraguayans had never experienced before, certainly not in the days when their country was a colony of Spain. Eliza scandalised the locals in the same way as, say, Edith Piaf would have scandalised the locals at the Women’s Institute in Huddersfield.
From then on Eliza stood by him – though he did not always stand by her – till his death on the field of battle in 1870. In the meantime, he had assumed the presidency from his late father, disastrously declared hostilities on Paraguay’s neighbours – Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay – in what became known as the War of the Triple Alliance and lost. Paraguay was left drained of blood and with a debt of reparations to Brazil which was not paid off until the Second World War.
On the battlefield of Cerro Corá, Eliza buried him and their son, a teenager of 15 and already a full colonel, in a shallow grave dug with her own hands after the last Paraguayan resistance had been overcome by the Brazilian lancers. At the end of the war the army was left with only 200 starving soldiers of the 100,000 López had put into the field six years before.
The widowed lady had many problems on the death of her man, some of which she sought to remedy in the courts of Edinburgh – without too much success – and turned tail on her arrival back in Asunción after the treachery of those who she thought were her friends.
Worse for her must have been the vitriol which was poured out against her by the Paraguayan bourgeoisie and by the Brazilian lie factory which sought to blacken her name. Those responsible would have rivalled the rumour mill which brought Britain into the international opprobrium generated by the motiveless slaughter of civilians in the criminal modern-day Anglo-US adventure in Iraq.
Eliza died a lonely death at her flat in Paris on July 25 1886 and, until the transfer of her mortal remains to Asunción in 1961, she was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in the French capital.
The authors – Michael Lillis is a former Irish diplomat and one of the creators of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, Ronan Fanning is a history professor at University College, Dublin – have brought the characters and the times of 19th century Paraguay alive with astonishing skill. Their work deserves the highest praise.
Hugh O’Shaughnessy
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