After the war, the Laredós return to live in Paris, not quite as grandly, but still in respectable surroundings, near the rue du Colisée, a little lower down the Champs Elysées. We must imagine the uneventful adolescence of the girl, educated at some private catholic school in Auteuil, until she launches herself in the world of Arts and Letters, with the benign patronage of distinguished people who know her grandfather – or her mother. She dabbles in journalism, and, at seventeen, she completes a book of poetry, and submits it to a panel of Ambassadors and Academicians, then famous, now forgotten. The title “Paupières d’ivoire” (Ivory eyelids) may be a reminiscence from a poem by Saint-John Perse, or mere coincidence between two lyrical souls. Of course the prize should go to her, were it not for some mysterious diplomatic influences.

Then Maria Pia falls in love, probably in Biarritz, during the fireworks of Bastille day, with a mysterious young Spanish lawyer to whom she gives «  a kiss, no more ». She certainly never forgot him. Almost at the same time - in 1925 - she marries a Cuban play-boy, older than her by twenty years, Francisco Javier Bilbao y Batista. He belongs to a very distinguished and very rich family of cattle breeders, in the Camaguey province. As for himself, between Paris and New-York, he squanders pleasantly the remainder of his fortune. He has been married twice before, so no church bells sound when Maria Pia becomes Mrs Bilbao, in the Cuban Embassy of Paris. She is barely eighteen, and we may wonder why her mother gave her consent to such a wedding – or if she might possibly have run away. There is reason to believe that this marriage was a terrible disillusion.

However, Maria Pia roughs it bravely, sails to Havana where she meets all the best people in society and in the press, seduces – intellectually – the future dictator Fulgencio Batista, and gives him some very wise advice on politics. Then, separated somehow from her husband, she comes back to Europe and shares her time between Paris and Madrid. In Madrid she is greeted by her old friends, including King Alfonso and the Count of Romanones, one of the major politicians of the Reign, who has always been charmed by her mischievous spirit. Whenever the Kings goes to Biarritz, she joins his party, the “jet set” of those times, sipping gleefully champagne and daiquiris in the merry nights of the “Royal Beach”.

After the fall of the Spanish monarchy in 1931, and until the beginning of the Civil war in 1935, she spends much time in Madrid, an heroin of fidelity to the royal cause, embroidering shirts for handsome José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange. The devil of a woman can never be quiet. Don Torquato de Luca de Tena, the press tycoon, asks her to work as a journalist for his papers: « Blanco y Negro » and ABC; one particularly brave article, titled “The two Mussolinis” will arouse the ire of the Duce. At the same time, she displays her musical gifts in Paris, composes charming things published by Salabert, and organises in the new Salle Pleyel a charity concert where the Colonne Orchestra, directed by Gabriel Pierné, plays Manuel de Falla. She herself travels to Granada, learns to dance flamenco – one of the few achievements that she owns to not mastering perfectly -, and is admitted into the intimacy of Falla and his favourite poet, Federico Garcia Lorca. Federico writes for her, or about her, a delightful poem on the death of a white kitten. As to Falla, he likes to play her compositions on the piano, as a relaxation - or possibly an inspiration - in the intervals of composing his own “Atlantis”.

In 1935 she learns by the Cuban Ambassador that her husband has died over there in Camaguey. Then she writes and publishes – probably with her own money - a book advocating the restoration of monarchy in Spain. It is called “The hour of Alfonso XIII”, a proof of loyalty if not of political prescience. At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, she briefly crosses over to New York, and finally settles down in Rome with her mother. Not the most natural move, if one thinks that she has angered Mussolini with her papers, but a move that seems to have been carefully planned with the approval of Alfonso XIII, ever her benign and distant protector.

In those late thirties, the main preoccupation of Kings and Governments in Europe was, of course, to find a worthy husband for the young widow. Count Ciano and Josef Goebbels put their heads together to plot suitable and elaborate schemes. Two royal cousins are considered: George Windsor and Aimone d’Aosta, the Duke of Kent and the Duke of Spolete (who was to be – for a short time - king Tomislav of Croatia), but they both marry Greek princesses, and eventually Maria Pia falls in love with a colonel of carabinieri, Giuseppe Blais, with no royal connections, but of honourable Piemontese stock, and extremely handsome. As military regulations forbid marriage between an officer and a foreigner, Friar Lawrence blesses the clandestine wedding of the fifty-year-old Romeo and thirty-year-old Juliet in a chapel of the Vatican, on September 2, 1939. Four years pass, the colonel becomes a general, then he is arrested by the Germans; Maria Pia rushes to Milan to rescue him, defying the stupidity of the fascists in great jeopardy of her own freedom. But the Allies win the war. Mussolini is hanged. The happy pair may now rejoin and officially proclaim their union. Gregory Peck kisses Lana Turner against the sun setting on an Italian lake, and the light comes back gradually over a dazed and fascinated audience.

One is indeed easily carried away by the flowing prose of Maria Pia, both in Spanish and in French, in a style both characteristic of the “femme du monde” and the polyglot, with a taste for the hidden allusion, and a genuine sense of humour. Her writing might compete for “niceness” with that of any of the fashionable lady-novelists of the first quarter of the XXth Century, but at the same time it reveals the natural concision and deftness in word-play of a good professional. Almost a writer, would have said Wenceslao Fern á ndez Florez.

Also, almost a princess…or was she?