In the spring of 1854 in Paris, Francisco Solano López came to the house of Eliza Lynch to improve his French, or so he said. Eliza was nineteen, already with an ex-husband, and he was the young son of Paraguay's dictator in Europe recruiting engineers for South America's first railroad. By the time he returned to Asunción in 1855, Eliza was pregnant with his child. In less than a decade, López plunged Paraguay into a conflict that would kill over half its population. By then Eliza was notorious-as both the angel of the battlefield inspiring the troops, and the demon whose rapacious appetites drove López's fatal ambition

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