CubaPLUS Magazine

She shone in high Parisian society in the first half of the 19th century, under the title of nobility and also the literary pseudonym of Countess of Merlin, acquired in Spain at the age of 20 by her marriage to a French general of that surname.

However, she had also been born an aristocrat and in a golden cradle that Havanan named María de las Mercedes Beltrán Santa Cruz y Cárdenas Montalvo y O'Farrill (Havana 1789 – Paris 1852), daughter of the counts of the Casa Jaruco.

Although she only lived on the Island until she was 12 years old, she was first educated freely by a pampering great-aunt and then in the severity of the Santa Clara Convent, unforgettable stages of her existence. She wrote about part of those experiences, among other topics, and is considered one of the forerunners of literature written by women in Cuba, despite the fact that it was written in French and published outside the colony.

Her remarkable intelligence and great beauty were also magnets in the halls of her mansion, where her numerous friends held gatherings, concerts and parties. Artists and cultural personalities such as Rossini, Meyerbeer, Musset, Listz, Chopin, Balzac, Orfila, María Malibrán, George Sand, passed through there and many more.

Because of her beautiful soprano voice, she was also recognized as an excellent singer. Seductive hostess, always at the height of her famous guests, curiously she had begun her worldly education and enriched her intellectual gifts before getting married, in Spain, where her mother took her to live from the age of 12, since she was a lady of the court of Queen Maria Luisa. When the family had to flee to France, due to the defeat of Bonapartism in the peninsula, she began her triumphant career in the City of Light.

She did not hide behind a masculine name to print her writings. And she achieved recognition called simply Countess of Merlin. Among the literary genres in which he settled were the autobiography My first twelve years (1831), a narration about her childhood in Havana and the biography, with Historia de Sor Inés, about the existence of a nun at  the Convent in which she was cloistered for eight years.

Cubans greatly appreciate her work Viaje a La Habana (1844), within a somewhat hybrid genre of epistles and travel narratives, with the "exotic" -for Europeans- experiences of a journey to visit her homeland, in 1840.