Following usage and according to the seasons, they go to Biarritz, Deauville and other fashionable places. Maria Pia has a narrow escape from being kidnapped. Her clamours and Miss Swallwood’s solid British umbrella rout away the would-be captors. We do not know if those inexpert and unsuccessful snatchers were anarchists, or secret police agents, or simply the product of retroactive fantasy. Of one thing only are we certain: they wore coke hats. And whiskers.  

The British having had the unfortunate idea of acclimating the hevea in Asia, the price of rubber falls spectacularly and with it dwindles the fortune of Baron Laredó.   After the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of Austria (not a cousin, really), the European powers plunge in that vertigo of self-destruction called the First World war,  and our Brazilians tactfully move as far as possible away from the field of operations, to a warm, neutral country, meaning Spain.   For reasons probably of the highest diplomatic importance, they do not go as far as Madrid, where of course King Alfonso XIII would have welcomed them generously, and perhaps been their host in the Palacio de Oriente. Instead, they stop at  Vitória de Álava, which is now the capital of the Basque autonomous region.  Nobody could call it the most elegant of resorts. But the noble austerity of this small backwater town suits perfectly Maria Pia’s mother, who goes to tea with the Bishop every afternoon. Though, perhaps, not during Lent. The girl, now aged seven, spends much time with her nurse on the training grounds of the garrison, where she proves to be a deft and enthusiast cyclist. The faithful Miss Smallwood watches over her safety, with one eye only, the other one being devoted to the reading of Shakespeare. Truly this Miss Smallwood must have been a remarkable woman, never to have let a wistful gaze drift away, never to have encouraged the attentions of any handsome sergeant of the Spanish Army! 

Soon, Maria Pia and her mother cross again the French border, and settle in Pau. This is now a rather dim provincial town, but then it was an elegant place, surrounded with thermal resorts and famous for the mildness of its climate and the excellent quality of its air. However, more than the climate, more than the historic castle, more than the magnificent landscape of the Boulevard des Pyrénées, the memory and imagination of the girl will be marked by the impressive whiskers of two magnificent gentlemen: Nicholas Petrovič Njegoč and Nuno Alvares Pereira de Melo.

Nicholas is the King of Montenegro. He is an old gentleman of seventy, for half a century the sovereign of his tiny balkan kingdom, whose independence he gallantly defended against the Ottoman Empire. His wife, Milena, a warrior queen and a national legend, has borne him twelve children, who almost all married into the old royal families of Europe. King Nicholas I plays with Maria Pia remembering his grandchildren scattered around the continent, and particularly the Italian ones, whose terrible fate he could never imagine (Humberto, king of Italy et Giovana, queen of Bulgaria, will go into exile after the Second World War, and Mafalda, the Landgravine of Hesse, will be deported by the Nazis, to die at Buchenwald.)

Nuno, who also takes a fancy to little Maria Pia, to the point of sending over his chaplain to instruct her in latin, and wearing her portrait on his heart, is the 10th Duke of Cadaval. He is twenty-six and noted for his regal looks. With good cause, because the Cadavals are a minor branch of the royal House of Braganza, legitimately and directly descended from the 2 nd Duke, D. Fernando. This family is allied, not only to the greatest families in Portugal, but of Europe, including the houses of Lorraine and Montmorency-Luxembourg. The young duchess comes from the illustrious French house of Gramont. In Pau, the dukes of Cadaval are not occasional residents: they have been living there for half a century. Since the 6 th Duke, D. Nuno Caetano, chief minister of king D. Miguel I followed his master in exile after the Evoramonte Covenant of 1834, they have walled themselves in haughty indifference, almost never set foot back in Portugal, and could not even be bothered to ask the reigning monarchs to confirm their title at the death of each incumbent.

Portugal having gallantly gone to war “on the side of the French who invaded it three times, and of the English who had tried to steal away its Empire, against the Germans who had never done anything against it,” the hospitals of Pau received a good many Portuguese casualties from the front. Visiting the sick and wounded was a fashionable duty that Amelia Laredo could not eschew. Maria Pia accompanies her mother in those charitable excursions, and of course, the word goes soon around that she is the daughter of King D. Carlos. The soldiers love her, fondle her, play with her, and those grown-up children pretend to conspire to give her the Crown. They don’t know that little children are always terribly serious, and that Maria Pia could never take as a joke the idea that she might be a Queen. On the contrary, it became a certainty that forever gained strength in her mind, until it became an obsession, and gave dramatic leverage against her to her adversaries.