Elisa's evil life

5 April 2012

As the bloodiest war in South American history drew to a close in 1869, explorer Richard Burton wrote: 'In Paraguay, money-making is a passion even more passionate than love-making.'

This sentiment might have been coined for Paraguay's antiheroine, the adventuress Elisa (or Eliza) Lynch, subject of two new biographies by Sian Rees and Nigel Cawthorne.

Flame-haired Elisa Lynch was a 19-year-old courtesan when she met the dictator of Paraguay's monstrous son, Francisco Lopez, in Paris in 1854.

'Always on the lookout for a freespending lecher,' in Nigel Cawthorne's words, Elisa recognised in Francisco her path to the wealth and power she craved, and allowed him to take her home with him to Paraguay.

She was determined to become, as Cawthorne's title suggests, the Empress of South America.

Beautiful, independent and sophisticated, Elisa was glaringly out of place in Paraguay's capital city Asuncion, whose largely barefoot, cigar-smoking, illiterate population inhabited one-storey adobe huts on unpaved streets of red mud.

Worse still, for the first seven years she lived there, Elisa was shunned by Asuncion's leading families for her association with Francisco, and was known - despite her silk gowns, marble palaces and possession of Paraguay's sole piano - as the 'Irish whore'.

In 1862, Carlos Lopez died and was succeeded by Francisco. Elisa's patience had been rewarded and her dreams were within her grasp. Her first act was to punish the Paraguayan ladies who had snubbed her for so long.

She held a masked ball, paid for by a subscription from the guests commanded to attend, in which she assigned all the costumes; Francisco's ageing, corpulent mother was asked to come as Diana, barebreasted-goddess of the chase. Elisa herself was Elizabeth I, accompaniedby a grotesque, bearded Napoleon.

Relentlessly goading Francisco, Elisa propelled him, and Paraguay, into a war with all three of its neighbours, Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia, that would bring her lover to his death and his country to its knees.

Not for a minute during the seven years of brutal, bloody war that followed does Elisa seem to have displayed a shred of mercy or humanity.

Every night, while all around them the ragged Paraguayan army (made up, by the end of the war, by conscripted women and nineyear old-boys) gnawed on animal hide to assuage their hunger, Elisa's table groaned beneath French delicacies and champagne.

She bought vast estates for bags of salt, 'exchanged' all the coins taken from the pockets of dead soldiers for worthless Paraguayan currency, and requisitioned every piece of jewellery in Paraguay - ostensibly for the war-effort, in reality to smuggle out of the country as her own private pension scheme.

One story relates that when she discovered the shrine to the Virgin of Caacupe was laden with jewels of the highest quality, Elisa proposed to Bishop Palacios, her tame cleric, that since God must value glass and diamonds equally, then replacing the statue's jewels with paste would make no difference to Him.

Even Palacios was shocked by this suggestion, but he was helpless in the face of Elisa's greed. She stripped the Virgin of her priceless adornments and re-clothed her as Elizabeth I in the costume she had worn to her own fancy-dress ball.

Elisa Lynch left Paraguay in 1870, after she had seen her lover and son killed and dug their graves with her bare hands.

She returned a few years later only to be expelled from the country under threat of arrest, and had to be given an armed escort back to Buenos Aires.

Elisa died in Paris in 1886. Incredibly, in the 20th century her contribution to Paraguay's history was reassessed. In the Thirties, the Fascist Colonel Franco recreated Francisco Lopez as Paraguay's greatest national hero and Elisa, his consort-manque, as the heroine of the Americas; in 1961, Alfredo Stroessner had her body exhumed and returned to Paraguay in posthumous glory.

The problem with both of these books is that although Elisa Lynch was clearly an extraordinary, powerful woman, little documentation exists that is neither retrospective character-assassination nor hagiography (much written by Elisa herself).

She remains a shadowy, one-dimensional figure and both Rees and Cawthorne are forced frequently to rely on how Elisa 'must have' felt or what she 'would have' seen.