I think Infanta Eulalia is a very interesting character. Is there any book about her apart from her ‘memoirs’? I’ve heard Ricardo Mateos Sáinz de Medrano was writing a bio about Eulalia, does anyone know about this?
I’ve got a French book with interesting information about Infanta Eulalia. It mentions the flat she had in Paris, on Boulevard Lannes, which was decorated on the worst possible taste, full of pink and yellow plush courtains with furniture that didn’t match. Her service were a Spanish Countess and a young Argentinian female reader who was a lesbian (!)
She complained about the amount of money she got from her ‘civil list’, claiming that her sister Infanta Isabel (who according to Eulalia was ‘loaded’) received 250,000 pesetas and she got a mere 150,000.
She was very talkative, and her sense of humour was very ironic. As her grand-niece, the late Infanta Beatriz of Borbon said, ‘Aunt Eulalia had a sharp tongue’. She knew the secrets of most European Courts, specially the bedroom secrets.
Her nephew King Alfonso XIII said about her: ‘My aunt is very kind but she has impossible ideas, and when she wants anything she starts shouting as if she’s talking to a deaf. Then I start to shout louder like I’m commanding a cavalry regiment. There’s no other way to shut her up.’
About her troubled marriage with Antonio de Orléans, her cousin, I’ve read that he wrote some letters to his mother-in-law, the Queen Isabel II, telling her that Eulalia refused to have sex with him because she had some gynecological problems. As he was still young and ‘with needs’, he had to find in other women what his wife couldn’t give to him.
I don’t know if Eulalia’s problems were true or not but when Antonio was flirting with his lover ‘Carmela’, Eulalia was having an affair with Count Jametel – and, according to Antonio she had an abortion in France.
After the begining of World War II, in 1939, Eulalia returned to Spain. First she settled in Irun in a modest appartment. Her grand-son Ataulfo de Orléans-Borbón y Saxe-Coburg and Gotha helped her to build a new house after the sale of some land in Madrid. The name of the house was 'Villa Ataúlfo' and that's where the Infanta spent her last years. Her grand-grand-nephew, King Juan Carlos of Borbón, visited her at this house in 1955, three years before her death.
