And then she left for Rome with her mother. Rome was a congenial and civilized place. Of course there was that man Mussolini, but he coexisted quite peaceably with the small King Vittorio-Emmanuele and the good Queen Helena—the daughter of the nice be-whiskered old man in Pau, king Nicolas of Montenegro. She was a handsome widow, just turning thirty. She was well-acquainted, she had a brilliant personality, she moved easily with royalty and millionaires, but she was not, shall we say… not quite IT. "Miss Almost All," Venceslao Fernández Flórez might have said. She was not rich, either. Not very rich. Her grandfather's fortune had dwindled, and the income of her Cuban husband had largely died out with him. That could mean only one thing: she must marry. At this point, the fantasy-realm of Maria Pia reappears, when she suggests that Ciano and Goebbels were interested in choosing her husband, and that princely alliances had been sought. The idea that she might have considered the Duke of Kent is ludicrous. For two reasons: the Duke had married princess Marina of Greece in 1934, that is, before Maria Pia was widowed, and anybody who remembers the fantastic personality of Queen Mary will refuse to believe that she might have EVER accepted such a marriage for his youngest, best-beloved son. The Italian prince who was to be an ephemeral king of Croatia is, perhaps, a little more plausible—but, I fear, still improbable. In any case, Maria Pia chose Colonel Giuseppe Blais, a distinguished officer of the Carabinieri, a kind and handsome man, not rich but comfortably well off, who she married on the very day the Second World War began. An Italian officer could not, by law, marry a foreigner, and the religious ceremony was kept secret. Maria Pia and her mother spent most of the war in Rome, under the protection of the Portuguese Consulate. In due time the Colonel became a General, Mussolini was hanged, Peace returned, and the couple were reunited. A daughter, Maria Cristina, was born on July 28, 1946. The marriage was officially registered on August 5, 1946. The groom was – again – much older than the bride—but this was a happy and lasting union, based on fondness, respect, and certainly love. In all probability, General Blais accepted with patience and good-humour the grand gestures of his flamboyant wife.

As time passed, Signora Blais became, indeed, more flamboyant than ever, and her dramatic gestures took heroic proportions. She could not content herself with being the nice society lady, the charming old general's wife, and the driving force behind smart Roman charities. She wanted adventure. She wanted publicity. She wanted money. She thought she might get all three if she resumed her pre-war activity in journalism as Hilda de Toledano. She realized painfully that it was impossible: the War had also changed the public's attitude to information, world events moved at a much greater pace, and blunt, unsophisticated reporting was what the reader wanted. She tried her luck in Madrid, but Spain was also very different. The people who might have remembered her articles in "ABC" and "Blanco y Negro" had not all survived the Civil war, and the kind of press that circulated under General Franco's censorship had no use for a gifted amateur of exotic origin.

In the early fifties, she tried to force destiny and went to Morocco, news-hunting at her own expense. That country, with so many historic links to Spain and Portugal, was at that time fighting to recover its independence from France and Spain. She wanted to interview the Glawi, the governor or Marrakesh, chieftain of berber tribes in the South, who had always fought the central power of the Sultan and whom the French, with blind stupidity, had made a key figure of their policy. She had easily all the best introductions, as exiled royalty and Russian princes were thirteen a dozen in Rabat, Larache or Casablanca. It might have been a romantic expedition, and produced some good reporting, with a couple of well paid books, but it came to a piteous end, with a car breaking down and a royal donkey-hike back to the nearest town. She went back to Madrid a wrote her novel Un Beso y Nada Màs (Ed. Plenitud). It is possible that the Moroccan episode gave her material for a couple of minor characters in it. Anyway, the book did not sell much, deciding of the fate of "Hilda de Toledano" who chose to disappear—for Maria Pia de Saxe Cobourg to reappear in Paris, and gradually concentrate upon what was to become something of a manic obsession: her claim to the Braganza royal heritage.