Eugénie: The Empress & Her Empire - Plot & Excerpts
Yet noblemen lived in the city, including, at 12 Calle de Gracia, a handsome count with red hair and a patch over one eye. If he tended to avoid society, his beautiful wife adored it and would have preferred to live in Madrid, but her husband had been sent to Granada under house arrest.On 28 May an earthquake shook the city. Taking refuge in the garden, the pregnant countess was stricken with labour pains and gave birth in a tent to her second child, another daughter, who was christened Maria Eugenia Ignacia Augusta. Long after, Eugenia said she was sure that being born during an earthquake had meant that great things lay in store for her.Her father’s name was Don Cipriano de Guzmán y Palafox y Portocarrero, Count of Teba, and he belonged to one of Spain’s oldest families, the Guzmáns, claiming descent from the Visigoth kings who had reigned over the peninsula before the Moorish conquest. Cipriano’s branch owned vast estates, but as a younger son he had inherited very little. Born in 1786, he served with the Spanish marines at Trafalgar where a British musket ball crippled his left arm.
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