What if I tell you Maria Teresa Montalvo and O’Farrill, Countess of San Juan de Jaruco, a famous habanera, a widow with four children, but still young, appealing and perfectly encamable, was mistress of King Joseph I, that “Pepe Botella” elevated to the throne of Spain by the grace of His tender brother Napoleon? And that his daughter Maria de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, the very famous Countess of Merlin, was mistress in turn of Jerome Bonaparte, nephew of the Emperor?

Gossip of history?. The truth is that both substantiated by the comments. Lady Holland, in his book My trip to Spain, portrays the Countess of Jaruco as a “beautiful habanera, extremely voluptuous, who lives completely dedicated to the passion of love,” while in a political pamphlet of the time branded as “dissolute and scandalous.” As for the daughter, her biographers, always eager to delve into the dirty sheets, especially for being a woman’s, attribute a few romances, including Prince Jerome, without which we can turn around time know and what were Platonic and Aristotelian what.

The uncle of the Countess of Jaruco, Gonzalo O’Farrill occupied important positions in the court of the Bourbon King will be Finance Minister and the French king. In his palace in Madrid of Carnation Street, home to Maria Teresa, are frequent visits Moratín Quintana and poets and a painter by the name of Francisco de Goya, characters that are pleasing to the Countess as well as exasperate her husband, who prefer to receive on their properties to Don Manuel Godoy, attained the status of super-and exalted as a Prince of Peace through intimate favors taxed at the ugly, toothless Queen Maria Luisa and patient tolerance of simple Carlos IV.

In early 1795, Don Joaquin Santa Cruz and Cardenas, third Earl of San Juan de Jaruco and first Earl of Mopox, husband of Maria Teresa, has been appointed in Madrid chamberlain of Charles IV and do Knight of the Order of Calatrava until through his friendship with the thrust of Godoy and Francisco Arango Havana, the “stateless statesman,” eminence grise of the sugar Creole, he was appointed Deputy Inspector General of the Spanish troops in Cuba and president of a commission would develop plans, almost all designed by Conde himself, for the economic transformation of the island

These positions require you to travel to Cuba again and again and as the Count was away from Madrid malignant rumors abound about the conduct of his wife Maria Teresa. True, and have many years of marriage, they married when he was fifteen and she was twelve. On one such trip, as he was suffering from dropsy, death surprised him in Havana, but it had led Spain to the eldest daughter, Maria de las Mercedes, which was here the care of a grandmother and later as a pupil in the Convent of Santa Clara, where, with ten or eleven years with the help of a nun, managed to escape, never to return.

Beautiful Habaneras
 
It is very beautiful Maria de las Mercedes, although we do not seem so far in the portraits. The Countess of Merlin is his pseudonym is considered one of the first writers of Cuba. She herself, in her book My first twelve years (1832) says that the eleven had reached their full size and very thin but I was so formed as any girl of eighteen. States: “My Creole color, my eyes black and lively, my hair so long it was hard to hold, I got a wild look, which was related to my moral dispositions … and passionate live-out, envisioned the need for repress my emotions, much less to hide. ”

Just thirteen years old when he arrived in Madrid and the Spanish aristocracy pays homage. The besieged soldiers, politicians, writers … Goya, one day, and see his paintings, rather than tables, repairing the fate of the teenager. He says: “As a painter not achieve the glory, but go far as a woman.”

The political events of precipitate. Napoleon, who wants to swallow the whole of Europe, invades Spain. Carlos IV abdicates and force him to move to France, and Godoy is imprisoned, while the Spanish people up in arms against the foreigner and will not cease in their struggle to expel him. The nobles were cowed, and many flee, others stay and, after the initial confusion, seek accommodation next to the French. They include Gonzalo O’Farrill, uncle of the Countess of Jaruco, and the very Countess who, they say, then find comfort to her widowhood in the arms of the usurper king Joseph I.

It was a bad move. When the Bourbons recover the throne in the person of ill-fated Ferdinand VII, son of Charles and Maria Luisa, Countess of Jaruco and had died (Died April 17, 1812 in Madrid, Spain), but the guy suffer exile and the family fortune will be confiscated. By then Maria de las Mercedes, daughter of Maria Theresa, is married to Antonio Christopher Merlin, a French general in Spain received the title of Count. When married, she is twenty years old and he was forty. Do not think, however, in a relationship of convenience, very good game that the General could be in the occupied country. The letters referred to it when he begins in the conquest of Andalusia show a woman in love. They are, says professor Salvador Bueno, letters “written with a certain naivete at times, and others with passionate words and frankly erotic references.” Very different from what you might write to Philarete Chasles, a lover of trashy, failed writer and historian, who takes advantage of the love of the Countess and widow and a stage where the beauty of Merlin urgently needed body work and its economy was cracking .

It is common to find comments on the love life of the Countess of Merlin, Jerome Bonaparte and her lovers Philarete Chasles and admiration that caused her beauty.

These two women and hanging out, according to some commentators, they would like to pay admiration, lovers reveindicandolas as admirable, intelligent fighters, in their capacity as Spanish prostitutes. Cervantes’s sisters were also prostitutes. At that time I had not invented anything that was not written in history, were true or hearsay only. It seems that what is best for learning the arts of love female is going through Cuba, and unless they are told Pepe Botella or Napoleon himself, because Josephine was also Caribbean.

Then, came the Collapse
 
You should also leave Spain the Countess of Merlin before the fall of Joseph I. And I will play to attend, years later in Paris, the collapse of Napoleon. Although excluded from the new court headed by another Bourbon, Louis XVIII, marriage, who has three children, holds a position and residence is visited by many celebrities. Maria de las Mercedes alternate Victor Hugo and Lamartine, Musset, Rossini, Maria Malibran, the celebrated singer, and Domingo del Monte and Jose Antonio Saco, his countrymen, in meetings in which the Countess left hear his beautiful soprano voice.

After my first twelve years, book of 1831, the pen of the Countess of Merlin continued to submit pages to complete a very interesting book. They can be found beyond the literary qualities (actually, unequal), the mosaic of a time told from the unique experience of its author. The said Agnes Sister Story (1832), Memoires et Souvenirs (1836), women’s hobbies in the world (1838), Madame Malinbran, the aforementioned trip to Havana (1844), Lola and Mary and The lionesses in Paris (both 1845) and Le Duc d’Athènes (1852), among other books and articles, form a romantic poetic not to ignore the Cuban literature of a period of full foundation.

CASA DE LOS CONDES DE JARUCO EN LA HABANA

That world begins to crumble with the death of Antonio Merlin, in 1839. Countess travels to Cuba and collects data for its most famous work, The Havane, writing on behalf of slaveholding planters, who give back very good service. Also appear in Spanish, abbreviated and with a foreword by Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, entitled Travel to Havana. In 1845 he returned to Spain. He wants back what the Bourbons confiscated his. “Never was so well attended pedigüeña” he writes, but nothing does, is to empty-handed.

And comes the end. Surrounded by her children and forgotten by those who both flattered and shone in their classrooms, go get extraordinary death with resignation, the March 31, 1852, at sixty-three years old under the protection of his daughter in the Castle Dissay, on the outskirts of Poitiers, France. A small procession followed his remains to the cemetery of Pere Lachaise Paris. Many years later, Domingo Figarola-Caneda, his most careful biographer, was able to locate his grave. It was covered with grass and there was not an epitaph to remind her to this beautiful Cuban excessively passionate and never was careful to suppress their feelings and emotions.

Agencies/Various/InternetPhotos/TheCubanHistory.com
The Cuban History, Hollywood.
Arnoldo Varona, Editor.

TheCubanHistory.com Comments

comments