After dealing with Pancha, Francisco fell for Carmencita Cordal and was determined to make her his concubine. She was about to be married to her cousin, Carlos Decoud, the son of one of Paraguay’s leading families. Decoud had the temerity to pick a fight with Francisco and thrash him humiliatingly. It was a foolish move. Carlos Lopez had Decoud arrested on trumpedup charges of plotting a coup d’etat.
The night before he was to be wed to Carmencita, Decoud was executed and his bloodstained corpse was flung into the street in front of her house — some say it was actually delivered to her living-room. Carmencita spent the rest of her life dressed in black, praying in desert shrines and gathering flowers by moonlight.
The daughters of all the leading families began applying for passports and Francisco’s behaviour became so outrageous that Carlos Lopez thought it best that he leave the country while the situation cooled down. So Francisco headed off to Europe with an unlimited bank account. His mission was to buy a navy -just what a landlocked country like Paraguay needed.
On arriving in Paris, young Lopez left the tedious business of state to his secretary and, as the American ambassador put it, “gave loose rein to his natural licentious propensities, and plunged into the vices of that gay capital”.
A great fan of Napoleon, Francisco was eager to be presented at the court of Napoleon III. He squeezed himself into one of his smallest uniforms — he thought, mistakenly, that tight clothing would disguise his corpulent form.
When he was presented to the Emperor, he kissed the Empress’s hand. She turned away and promptly vomited over an ormolu desk, later excusing herself on the grounds that she was pregnant.
Francisco Lopez made a flying visit to London, but Queen Victoria discovered that she was “quite too busy” to entertain her Paraguayan guest.
Back in Paris, Francisco met a young woman who managed to overlook his repulsive appearance. It was said that, where others saw only rotting teeth, she saw jewels. Her name was Eliza Lynch.
Born in County Cork in 1835, she was said to have too much imagination, too many brains and too much libido. She was married at the age of fifteen, divorced at seventeen, and had taken a string of lovers by eighteen. Her family had fled to France to escape the 1845 famine. Her first husband was Xavier Quatrefages, a career officer in the French Army. He was old enough to be her father, but the marriage was an escape from the poverty her family had sunk into.
Her husband was posted to Algiers where Eliza was raped by his commanding officer. Quatrefages took no action to defend his wife’s honour, but she had met a dashing young Russian cavalry officer who did. He killed the colonel and took Eliza off to Paris where he established her in a house in the fashionable Boulevard Saint Germain. But her dashing young cavalry officer soon abandoned her for the excitement of the Crimean War.
Pictures of her from that time show that she was an extraordinarily beautiful woman and she decided to pursue a career as a courtesan. Argentinian journalist Hector Varela described her:
She was tall with a flexible and delicate figure with beautiful and seductive curves. Her skin was alabaster. Her eyes were of a blue that seems borrowed from the very hues of heaven and had an expression of ineffable sweetness in whose depths the light of Cupid was enthroned. Her beautiful lips were indescribably expressive of the voluptuous, moistened by an ethereal deco that God must have provided to lull the fires within her, a mouth that was like a cup of delight at the banquet table of ardent passion. Her hands were small with long fingers, the nails perfectly formed and delicately polished. She was, evidently, one of those women mho make the care of their appearance a religion.
She had a flair for language and a quick wit, and was soon entertaining numerous gentlemen callers. Her reputation grew and no man of substance would leave Paris without having paid a visit to Chez Lynch.
Eliza was still only nineteen when she entertained a man named Brizuela, who was one of Francisco’s retinue. He boasted of his dalliance to the young Lopez, who decided to see this jewel with his own eyes. Eliza was equally eager to entertain this savage who all Paris knew was spraying money around like buckshot.
Within hours of entering Madame Lynch’s salon, Francisco entered her boudoir. The next day he told her of the riches of his country. The day after that, she gave notice to her landlord.
There is no doubt that Lopez was desperately in love with Eliza. He had met beautiful women before, but Eliza was the first woman to go to bed with him without putting up a struggle first.
Eliza, for her part, must have felt some physical revulsion for the loathsome creature. But, although she had no real idea where Paraguay was, she had a shrewd sense of money and power. She was quick-witted enough to know that, while she was a sought-after beauty at nineteen, all too soon she would loose her power to charm, and here was a man who could keep her in clover for the rest of her life. He told her that, one day, he would become the emperor of South America. Could she not be his empress?
Neglecting the tiresome formalities of marriage, they set off on a honeymoon around Europe. On the way, Eliza picked up trunkloads of gowns and jewels. They dined with the notorious Queen Isabella of Spain, who suggested that Paraguay hold a referendum to see if the people wanted to return to the Spanish fold. Francisco said he would think about it. He didn’t.
In Rome, it was said, Eliza held a “wickedly obscene” dinner party for the pope. Then, after a tour of the Crimean battlefront, the happy couple headed for Paraguay.
Francisco’s brother Benigno, who had been with Francisco in Paris, had already returned to Paraguay and told Carlos Lopez that Francisco was involved with “una ramera irlandesa” — an Irish prostitute. Fearing his father’s wrath, Francisco and Eliza stopped off in Buenos Aires. Doña Juana and Francisco’s two sisters said that they refused to accept “La Irlandesa”, but Carlos realized that he was getting old and needed his son and heir back in the country. Reassured by a message from his father, Francisco and an apprehensive Eliza began the slow thousand-mile voyage up river to Asuncion.
When they arrived, Eliza was heavily pregnant. The women of the Lopez family were good to their word. They refused to accept Eliza. She responded by strutting around Asuncion in the latest Paris fashions, showing off her magnificent figure. This quite outshone anything the Lopez sisters had to offer.
Eliza soon found that she did not have a free hand with Francisco. He stall maintained his former lover, Juana Pesoa, and their two children in his town house in Asuncion. He also took other lovers. Eliza took control by selecting his concubines for him. She took great pains over this task. Although she would not marry Francisco herself -fearing that, as his wife rather than his mistress, she would lose all power over him — she had to make sure that no one else did either.
Francisco Lopez also persisted in his brutal seduction techniques. When he fell in love with the daughter of Pedro Burgos, a magistrate from the small provincial city of Luque, he threatened to confiscate her father’s property if she did not submit. However, Pedro Burgos was not without some influence with Carlos Lopez. Eliza stepped in. Once she had ascertained that Pedro’s daughter had no desire whatsoever to marry Francisco, she encouraged Pedro to accept Francisco as his daughter’s lover — on the promise that he would be amply rewarded when Francisco came to power. His daughter submitted, but Pedro Burgos was later executed by Francisco in the belief that he was plotting against him.