Meanwhile, Consuelo’s experience of Paris during the late spring of 1894 was happier than it had ever been. She and Alva moved into the Hôtel Bristol. ‘I can still see the view over the Tuileries Gardens from our windows, still enjoy our walks under the flowering chestnuts of the Champs Elysées and our drives in the Bois de Boulogne in our carriage and pair. Every day there were visits to museums and churches and lectures at the Sorbonne, but the classical matinées at the Théâtre Français were my greatest pleasure.’40 It was only with hindsight that she realised that her mother spent the early summer of that year preparing her for an aristocratic setting. Alva chose Consuelo’s dresses from the great French dressmakers – Worth, Doucet and Rouff – and she arranged for her to have elocution lessons, in French, with an actress from the Comédie Française, where there was a long tradition of perfect diction. It seems likely that Alva arranged these lessons to prepare her daughter for a public life such as that of Lady Lansdowne’s, where good voice projection was required when opening bazaars and returning speeches of welcome. ‘Whatever her motive, the lessons produced a voice that carried,’ said Consuelo. (Alva was later frustrated by her own fear of public speaking, brought up in a world where, in the rare event that a woman wrote a speech, she would hand it over to be read by a man.)
While they were in Paris, Alva also commissioned the portrait of Consuelo that now hangs at Blenheim, by Carolus-Duran. Alva’s choice of artist was significant for Carolus-Duran was a fashionable painter particularly renowned for his portraits of aristocratic women. In an early exercise in branding, Alva requested that the background of red velvet which Carolus-Duran normally used should be replaced by a landscape in the classical style of the English eighteenth century, wishing Consuelo to ‘bear comparison with those of preceding duchesses who had been painted by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney and Lawrence’.41 On its completion, Alva arranged for it to be shipped to America and hung in the Gold Room at Marble House.
Consuelo made her Paris debut that summer at a ball given by the Duc and Duchesse de Gramont for their eldest daughter; she wore a dress of white tulle by Worth. ‘It touched the ground with a full skirt, as was the fashion in those days, and it had a tightly laced bodice. My hair was piled high in curls and a narrow ribbon was tied round my long and slender neck. I had no jewels and wore gloves that came almost to my shoulders. The French dubbed me La belle Mlle. Vanderbilt au long cou.’42 The party was a bal blanc, as parties for debutantes were known, where all the young women wore white. Elisabeth de Gramont remembered Consuelo as ‘a tall girl whose small head with retroussé eyes like a Japanese, drooped languidly over her shoulder. She possessed great charm.’43 Such evenings were misery for ‘wallflowers’ for whom any help from artifice was banned. ‘Good girls were dressed in light, insipid colours and the poorest of materials, and all the touches that give “tone” – diamonds, powder, paint and perfume – were rigorously forbidden.’44 The aces of the period, the grand ‘marrying men’, would sometimes look in briefly at these social gatherings, at the rows of nervous, perspiring debutantes lined up like cattle for their inspection. (On one occasion Elisabeth de Gramont heard one say: ‘This place stinks of armpits, let’s go to Maxim’s.’45) There was little opportunity for conversation because permission to dance had to be sought from the young lady’s chaperone and as soon as the dance was over, she was led straight back to her mother.
There was no shortage of partners for a seventeen-year-old American heiress, however, and by the end of June, Consuelo had received five proposals of marriage. ‘When I say I had, I mean that my mother informed me that five men had asked her for my hand … She had, as a matter of course, refused them, since she considered none of them sufficiently exalted.’46 Consuelo was only allowed to consider one: Prince Francis Joseph, a German prince who was the youngest of the four Battenberg princes, and at the centre of an intrigue to elect him ruler of Bulgaria. Confronted with the prospect of a royal crown rather than an English ducal coronet, Alva seems momentarily to have wavered from her original plan and Prince Francis Joseph was allowed to present his case to Consuelo. She was horrified both by the idea and by the Prince to whom she developed an immediate aversion. Alva too had second thoughts, unsure whether the intrigue would succeed. Nothing more was heard from her on the subject, though news of this potential engagement eventually reached Town Topics in New York who asserted (correctly this time) that: ‘There is a general feeling that the report is not based upon facts, at this time at least.’47
In June, Alva took Consuelo to England. ‘[Alva] did not let her dally long in the drawing-rooms of Paris,’ wrote Elisabeth de Gramont. ‘She intended [Consuelo] for the English aristocracy, which she deemed more advantageous.’48 Here Alva rented a house at Danesfield near Marlow and asked her old friend Mrs William Jay and her daughters to join them. The weather was so cold that they only went to Danesfield at the weekends and spent the rest of the time in the warmth of a London hotel. Consuelo described it as ‘frowsty in the true English sense’,49 and thought with longing of their lovely hotel in Paris beside the Tuileries Gardens.
In England, Alva made use of her networks. The two people whose help she enlisted in the summer of 1894 were Consuelo Yznaga, now Duchess of Manchester, and Minnie Stevens, now Mrs Paget – pre-eminent figures in English society, favourites of the Prince of Wales and leading lights of his circle known as the Marlborough House Set. Consuelo did not care for Minnie Paget (later Lady Paget) one jot, however. ‘Lady Paget was considered handsome; to me, with her quick wit and worldly standards, she was Becky Sharp incarnate … Once greetings had been exchanged I realised with a sense of acute discomfort that I was being critically appraised by a pair of hard green eyes.’50
Such scrutiny was all too familiar. In an age when young women were commodities on the marriage market, they were forced to become accustomed to such analysis, which is not to say they enjoyed it.* ‘I was particularly sensitive about my nose, for it had an upward curve which my mother and her friends discussed with complete disregard for my feelings,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘Since nothing could be done to guide its misguided progress, there seemed to be no point in stressing my misfortune.’51 In London, Minnie Paget expressed her views forcefully. ‘The simple dress I was wearing, my shyness and diffidence, which in France were regarded as natural in a debutante, appeared to awaken her ridicule. “If I am to bring her out,” she told my mother, “she must be able to compete at least as far as clothes are concerned with far better-looking girls” … It was useless to demur that I was only seventeen. Tulle must give way to satin, the baby décolletage to a more generous display of neck and arms, naiveté to sophistication. Lady Paget was adamant.’52
Minnie Paget was once described by Town Topics as having ‘watchful eyes ever on someone with money to burn’,53 and was rumoured to accept a fee for this kind of help. Having made over Consuelo to her satisfaction she arranged a dinner party to which she invited the young Duke of Marlborough. By now Alva’s plan was becoming clear, even to her daughter. Minnie Paget placed the Duke to her right with Consuelo on his other side – ‘a rather unnecessary public avowal of her intentions’ Consuelo thought afterwards. ‘He seemed to