We can have no doubt that Maria Pia was acknowledged in her lifetime – at least by part of the princely establishment in Europe – as a natural daughter of king Carlos I. She certainly was by the family of Alfonso XIII, the King of Spain. A son of the King, Don Jaime de Borbón y Battenberg, duke of Anjou and Segovia, has written a statement to that effect, that cannot be seriously challenged. D. Jaime's widow, Doña Emanuela de Dampierre, the Duchess of Anjou, speaking to me via telephone in March 2003, certainly confirmed that Maria Pia's Braganza connection had been accepted as a matter of fact by King Alfonso. To the Duchess of Anjou, however, it was very clear that such connection did not entail any dynastic rights, and she recalled, with regal and pungent humour, the somewhat excessive personality and pugnacity of Maria Pia.

This should be accepted as an indication that we are not dealing with a crazy lady who fancied herself a Princess, nor with a shameless crook who posed as one. King Alfonso XIII in the 1930's was a man in his prime, who might lose his crown, but not his head, and could certainly not be fooled by any royal pretence of either madwoman or adventuress. It does not mean, however, that Maria Pia's story should not be taken without a grain of salt. In fact, an ounce might be more appropriate. For the lady, charming and royal as she was, was also a charming and royal liar.

Her highly entertaining book of memoirs, the natural base for any attempt at outlining her personality, contains several anecdotes that have been – to say the least – exaggerated by a fanciful pen. If the highly-legitimist duke of Cadaval sent his chaplain to indoctrinate the child Maria Pia, we are not prepared to see there more than a gesture of aristocratic courtesy. There is no earthly reason to believe that Don Nuno would have acknowledged a feudal bond to the illegitimate scion of a royal branch that he did not even recognize. She probably also played-up her position with De Falla, as she is not mentioned by the composer's biographers, and her influence was hardly needed to have his music played in Paris: he already had the support of the Princesse de Polignac, born Winnaretta Singer, who was one of the American queens of French society. Those are just trifles, of course. We may even accept that she is not herself responsible for those little exaggerations, but that her good publisher, Cino del Duca, a czar of the book industry at the time, had her book spiced-up to suit the public appetite. Such small lies do however cast the shadow of suspicion on Maria Pia's entire story.

This suspicion is heightened when Maria Pia pretends to have met, during a secret journey to Lisbon in the twenties, an old woman who kept a picture of her as a child, and wept tenderly upon the memory of "a infantinha" — the little princess. This is absurd. No picture of the King's bastard could have been handed out during the three last years of the monarchy, and certainly not with a royal caption: it would have been an insult to the Queen, very much alive and generally respected. The story, however, may not have been entirely made up. An "infantinha", that old people might remember with sad fondness, could be Maria Ana, the second child of king Carlos and Queen Amélie, who died in infancy in 1887, twenty years before Maria Pia was born. Maria Ana's death had been a tragedy for the royal couple, then young and beloved as Duke and Duchess of Braganza (Carlos did not succeed to the throne until 1890) and it is probable that the people had shared in their grief. It is, however, doubtful that any kind of likeness of Maria Ana could have been circulated, as the premature baby died shortly after birth. We can safely assert that, between her own birth in 1907 and the fall of the Monarchy in 1910, very few people indeed knew of the existence of Maria Pia — and certainly none thought of her as a rightful infanta.