The Señorita would hardly be Spanish were she not much in view when all Madrid foregathers at the bull-fights. Like her companions, she has her favourite toreadors, and is lavish of her rewards--gold and flowers. Matadors and picadors do her homage. She is coquette to her little finger-tips. A smile from that sunny face and a word from those rosebud lips are eagerly contended for, and she is not slow in according both. Meanwhile the élégants group themselves around her as thick as bees round the tulips and honeysuckles. In those Southern climes, if anywhere, flirtation is one of the fine arts. The Señorita Eugénie--“Ugenia” in her own language--is not the least ardent disciple of the genus flirt. She coquettes with this Duke and that Duke. He of Ossuna and he of Sesto (Alganices) are rivals. There is yet a third Duke--Alba--over whom she essays to cast a spell; but, alas! the course of true love is diverted--perhaps unconsciously--by Pacca, the beautiful sister, and she it is who becomes Duquesa. Around this episode of unrequited love how many “histories” have been woven, mostly apocryphal! “Ugenia,” some would have us believe, resorts to what she thinks is a phial of poison, and awakes from her torpor to discover--oh, horror!--that she has swallowed a portion of the disgusting, but harmless, contents of a blacking-bottle!
No salon in Madrid was more frequented than the Comtesse de Montijo’s. The daughters were not the only magnets. Madame mère was a woman of esprit, and had a genius for making friends and keeping them. “Theatricals” drew all Madrid to the house. Eugénie was seen in De Musset’s “Caprice,” with the enamoured Duc de Sesto in the cast. The summers--or a portion of them--were passed on the Montijo property at Carabanchel.
Every great lady in Madrid has her circle of young and middle-aged men, known as “pollos”--literally, chickens. Among the Comtesse de Montijo’s “pollos,” all more or less smitten by the radiant Señorita Eugénie, was General Espartero’s successful rival, General Narvaly, Duke of Valencia, short, dark, a stern soldier, as supple in the young lady’s hands as the youngest and most impressionable of her “pollos.” A lady well known in social London, the wife of a foreign diplomatist, and gifted with the pen of a ready writer, drew this somewhat caustic portrait of the future Empress when she was the most-discussed personage in Madrid: