Washington Irving, in 1853, thirty-five years later, writing to his nephew, speaks in equal praise of Madame de Teba.

“I believe I told you,” he says, “that I knew the grandfather of the empress, old Mr. Fitzpatrick.  In 1827 I was in the house of his son-in-law, Count Teba, at Granada, a gallant, intelligent gentleman, much cut up in the wars, having lost an eye and been maimed in a leg and hand.  Some years after, in Madrid, I was invited to the house of his widow, Madame de Montijo, one of the leaders of ton.  She received me with the warmth and eagerness of an old friend.  She claimed me as the friend of her late husband.  She subsequently introduced me to the little girls I had known in Granada, now fashionable belles in Madrid.”

In some lines of Walter Savage Landor, Madame de Montijo was addressed as a “lode-star of her sex.”

The Marquis de Montijo had been an adherent of Joseph Bonaparte while the latter was king of Spain, and his eye had been put out at the battle of Salamanca.  He was a liberal in politics, and his house was always open to cultivated men.

Such was the ancestry of the beautiful young lady who, tall, fair, and graceful, with hair like one of Titian’s beauties, was travelling with her mother from capital to capital, after the marriage of her sister to the Duke of Alva, and who spent the winters of 1850, 1851, and 1852 in the French capital.  Mademoiselle Eugenie had conceived a romantic admiration for the young prince who at Strasburg and Boulogne had been so unfortunate.  Her father had been a stanch adherent of Bonaparte, and she is said to have pleaded with her mother at one time to visit the prisoner at Ham and to place her fortune at his disposal.

This circumstance, when confided to the prince president, disposed him to be interested in the young lady.  She and her mother were often at the Elysee, at Fontainebleau, and at Compiegne.  Mademoiselle de Montijo was a superb horsewoman, and riding was the emperor’s especial personal accomplishment.  On one occasion they got lost together in the forest at Compiegne, and then society began to make remarks upon their intimacy.

The emperor was indeed most seriously in love with Mademoiselle de Montijo.  It is said, on the authority of M. de Goncourt, that in one of their rides he asked her, with strange frankness, if she had ever been in love with any man.  She answered with equal frankness, “I may have had fancies, sire, but I have never forgotten that I was Mademoiselle de Montijo."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Pierre de Lano.  La Cour de L’Empereur Napoleon III.]

Such a project of marriage was not approved by the emperor’s family, it was not favored by his ministers, and the ladies of his court were all astir.