MADRID, Spain.- The name María de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo may not be familiar to many Cubans, but the nickname Countess of Merlín, acquired through her marriage to the French general Christophe-Antoine Merlín, to whom granted the title of count, it is known to many.
Although she lived for a few years in Cuba, María de las Mercedes was born in Havana on February 5, 1789, and while she was still a child she was involved in an unusual event for her age and the time in the city itself, when she escaped—thanks to the help of Sor Inés—from the Convent of Santa Clara, where she was interned because her parents—the famous María Teresa Montalvo O’Farril and Joaquín de Santa Cruz y Cárdenas, Count of Jaruco, who enjoyed preference at the Court of Charles IV—resided in Europe and the little girl was cared for on the Island with insufficient discipline by close relatives.
Finally, in 1802 he would join his parents in Spain, where he came into contact with renowned writers and artists who frequented his mother’s gatherings. At the age of 20 she married General Merlin, and five years later, she and her little daughter left Madrid with the French who were forced to do so by the anti-Napoleonic war. She settled in Paris, had other children and an intense social and intellectual life. She was also a praised soprano.
His work My first twelve years e Story of Sister Inés, written in French and published in Paris in 1831 and 1832, respectively, they would later be printed in Cuba. The second is compared with The Religious (1796), by Denis Diderot, which denounces imposed vocations and the prison nature of convents.
The books contribute to the study of female religious spaces in Havana, with descriptions of architectural elements of the Santa Clara Convent and allusions to monastic practices in institutions for women. These, and others, like Trip to Havana (1844), also republished a few times and in the 20th and 21st centuries themselves, are based on lived events and their content is entertaining and emotional.
In the first letter of the trip, dedicated to her eldest daughter, María de las Mercedes narrates: “I am delighted. Since this morning I have been breathing the warm and loving air of the Tropics, this air of life and enthusiasm, full of inexplicable delights. The sun, the stars, the ethereal vault, everything seems bigger, more diaphanous, more splendid to me. The clouds do not remain high in the sky, but rather they walk in the air, near our heads, with all the colors of the iris; and the atmosphere is so clear, so brilliant, that it seems sprinkled with a very fine dust of gold. My sight is not able to encompass it, to enjoy it all; my breast is not enough to contain my heart. I cry like a child, and I am crazy with joy. How sweet it is, my daughter, to be able to associate with the memories of a happy childhood (…) this multitude of delicious emotions, the spectacle of a rich and dazzling nature. What a treasure of poetry and tender feelings.”
In 1840 the Countess of Merlín had returned to Havana—for a short time—and sang at charity events. She later returned to France, where she lived her last 12 years and collaborated in important periodicals such as Two Worlds Review —Likewise, some Cubans like The hummingbird and the Havana Industrial Lighthouse They had reproduced his texts.
The story of a woman of the world (1838), about the life of her friend, the Spanish singer María Felicia García Malibrán, and the story Slaves in the Spanish colonies (1841) were other literary creations of the Countess of Merlin.
Who has been considered by scholars of the subject a precursor of Cuban literature written by women, died in Paris on March 31, 1852; They say that she was abandoned and impoverished and her remains remain forgotten in the Père Lachaise cemetery in the French capital.
2024-04-03 14:28:23
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