The Shadows of Elisa Lynch - How a Nineteenth-Century Irish Courtesan Became the Most Powerful Woman in Paraguay

In 1853, a beautiful Irishwoman left her soldier husband in Algeria to seek adventure in the boulevards of Paris. There she became a courtesan and met Francisco Solano Lopez, the son of a Paraguayan dictator. He had Napoleonic ambitions; she had dreams of being his Josephine, the Empress of South America. They left her Parisian boudoir for poor, landlocked, war-wrecked Paraguay. Although initially shunned by society, Elisa Lynch rose resolutely to become the richest and most notorious woman in Spanish America. She aided her lover in the war which destroyed the country, looted what she could from the wreckage and fled, eventually dying alone and impoverished in a Parisian brothel. Two generations of Paraguayan citizens reviled her but a third would seize upon her as a patriotic idol and exhume her grave in Paris for reburial with full military honours in Asuncion, Paraguay. This work of recovered history tells her remarkable story....