- Wenceslao Fernandez Florez and Adolphe Menjou – Memoirs of a Living Infanta – A Kiss, and nothing more – Whiskers and Cokes - Kings, Dukes and Neutrals in the Great War – A hasty marriage – A Cuban widow – An Italian romance.

One of the first credible witnesses to the life and personality of Maria Pia is Wenceslao Fernández Florez, a Spanish writer unjustly forgotten today. He was a man capable of expressing the essence of a dream with the greatest concision. A polyglot, he translated into Castilian some of the works of the great Portuguese novelist Eça de Queiroz. He was also a journalist and man-about-town. In 1924 or 1925, shortly after publishing his book The Seven Columns, he was spending some time in Biarritz, and there, in the lounge of a fashionable hotel, a pretty young lady mistook him for actor Adolphe Menjou, whose fine mustachio haunted many girlish dreams at that time. Maria Pia was pert, clever and fresh; she belonged to the smartest set in this smart resort, and enjoyed the amused friendship and protection of the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII, always a frequent visitor to Biarritz where as a young man he came to court Princess Eugenia-Victoria of Battenberg.

Fernández Flórez, then in his forties, fell under Maria Pia’s spell, recognized her intelligence and encouraged her literary vocation. A little later, he would call her: ‘Madame Presque Tout [Lady Almost all] almost a queen, almost beautiful, almost rich, never quite poor, never quite an artist, never quite a sportswoman, not quite plump and not quite thin; almost a saint but almost a vamp.’ In July, 1954, he wrote ‘Perhaps the capacity that was more developed in her at that time, after her great sensitiveness to Art, was Fantasy.'

Such fantasy, such sensitivity, accompanied Maria Pia in the building of an existence that defies simple logic and cold analysis. Thankfully, the literary bent of ‘Lady Almost All’ spurred her into writing books, that help us understand, and partly reconstruct, her story. She might well have said, like Oscar Wilde, that she had put her genius in her life and only her talent in her books. But life flows, death passes, and finally only the books remain. Maria Pia left two books, in two different languages, and under two different names. There is, however, no doubt whatsoever about their authorship. In 1954 in Madrid, Hilda de Toledano publishes a novel : Un Beso, y nada màs ( A Kiss, and nothing more ) with the complicated subtitle : Confidencia consciente de una pecadora inconsciente ( Conscious confessions of an unconscious sinner ). In 1957, in Paris, we find ‘Maria Pia of Saxe-Cobourg’ publishing Memoirs of a living Infanta . The novel is autobiographical, the biography romanticized. Both are the work of a spirited woman, who was not entirely happy all her life, to quote another of Fernández Flórez’s euphemisms, but who always had the royal elegance of responding to the blows of Fate with laughter. They tell a simple and plausible story:

For the Portuguese registry, Maria Pia was born in Lisbon, on March 13, 1907, in the Parish of the Sacred Heart, in a house that we may suppose that of her grandfather, Baron Laredó. The parish register served at that time of official register of births, and it was absolutely impossible to write in it any indication whatsoever of a royal paternity, illegitimate, and even adulterine. 

We have already stressed how tense was the political situation in the country at that time. The King’s intervention in the political game did not meet with general enthusiasm. His clever and successful foreign policy was misunderstood. Queen Amélie, and Queen Maria Pia the Queen mother, with a solid pack of unimaginative courtiers, supported the conservative catholic party. A few members of the aristocracy had gone over to the small but loud Republican party. A few people dreamed of deposing D. Carlos and replacing him with his son Luis-Filipe, a fair rosy-cheeked young man, who perhaps might be more amenable to their influence. João Franco, the trusted Prime Minister, did not seem to fathom the danger, and believed that the overwhelmingly favourable public opinion in the provinces could outbalance political intrigue in the capital. In such conditions, it was highly convenient that the Laredó family should leave Lisbon as soon as possible.  

One month after the birth of Maria Pia, they are in Madrid, where the child is first baptized in San Fermín de los Navarros, then shown to King Alfonso XIII who pronounces her a lovely little princess. They stay there a few months, a starched nurse pramming the child every day on the Paseo del Prado and in the park of Buen Retiro, with the nurses and children of the best society.  The assassination of king Carlos I, on Feb. 1, 1908, and the proclamation of the Portuguese Republic, on Oct. 5, 1910, are felt as terrible tragedies, but borne, of course, with true royal spirit. The Laredós move to Paris, setting up an opulent household  in the upper stretch of the Champs-Elysées, probably not far from the mythical « N° 202 » where Eça de Queiroz has set the Parisian scenes of his last novel.  They have a Brazilian butler called Napoleon Wanzeler, an English nurse called Miss Smallwood, and a housemaid from Martinica, whose ebony head is always crowned with a magnificent Madras scarf.