Wonder how was her relationship with her younger son ?
According to the books about him I’ve read his relationship with his mother Infanta Eulalia had its ups and downs. When Luis Fernando and his brother Alfonso were at a boarding school in England he wrote many letters to her mother expressing his devoted love and dreams about living with her. When he left school his relationship with his mother deteriorated and he went to live to Paris with his father Antonio d’Orléans and his lover Carmela. Eulalia hated Luis Fernando’s idea of being an actor and joining a theatre company in America. She wanted him to take charge of the estate he had inherited in Castillejo and didn’t like it when Luis announced his intention to stand for Deputy in Valencia. Despite her liberal attitude and thinking, Eulalia never accepted Luis’ homosexuality.
Luis used to comment about his problems with his good friend the Countess Blanche of Clermont-Tonnerre: “My father Don Antonio detests me and doesn’t give me any money. Keep your millions, I tell him. My mother hates me, every time I have a friend she tries to take him away, she’s jealous of my success.”
They shared the passion for handsome men. Luis Fernando’s inseparable companion, a portuguese called Antonio de Vasconcellos, had also been Eulalia’s lover. At one time, when he was seriously ill, both mother and son took care of him.
It seems their relationship improved over the years. In the late 20s, when Luis Fernando was determined to marry a millionaire who let him re-enter in France (he had been expelled in the mid-twenties by the French authorities and stripped from his title of ‘Infante’ by his cousin King Alfonso XIII in 1924) Eulalia took an active part. She announced, at the Hotel Plaza in Paris, the wedding of Luis and Mabelle Gilman, a former American actress who lived at a French Chateau thanks to the millions she got after her divorce from William Corey, a steel magnate. Luis and Mabelle (eight years his senior) had been good friends for a long time but the marriage never took place apparently for Mabelle’s refusal to leave her chateau for a more modest place in San Remo, Italy where Luis was living. An year later, Luis Fernando announced his marriage to a richer (an older) woman, Marie Say, Princess Amedée of Broglie who was 32 years his senior (!) Marie decided to announce the wedding to her mother-in-law, Infanta Eulalia, with a letter ending in the following sentence: “I will always be your respectful and devoted daughter” (The ‘daughter’ was seven years older than her ‘mother’).
Here’s a link of some interesting stories about Luis Fernando de Orléans
l'enfant terriblehttp://mrsastor.com/2008/04/by-end-of-19th-century-almost-anyone.html
