Early Life
She was born Eliza Alicia Lynch in Charleville, County Cork, Ireland. She emigrated at the age of ten with her family to Paris to escape the Great Irish Famine. On 3 June 1850, she married Xavier Quatrefages, a French officer who was shortly afterwards posted to Algeria. She accompanied him, but at eighteen years of age, due to deteriorating health, she returned to Paris to live with her mother in the Strafford household. Courtesy of a few fortuitous introductions, she later entered the elite circle surrounding Princess Mathilde Bonaparte and quickly set herself up as a courtesan.
She was described as possessing a Junoesque figure, golden blonde hair and a provocative smile. It was perhaps those very qualities that appealed to a visiting South American a year after her return to France. It was 1854 when Eliza Lynch met Francisco Solano López, son of Carlos Antonio López, president of Paraguay, one the wealthiest small southern nations in continental America. The young general López, in training with the Napoleonic army, kept his country's interests above all as fundamental reasons for his European journey. However, Lynch and López would begin a relationship which led her to return with him during that same year to Paraguay.
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