Recalling the national hero's romantic romp through Europe

Happy birthday Lolo Pepe Rizal! He was born 147 years ago today, and hardly a day goes by that I don't think of him. I suspect there are many others who derive their daily inspiration from this "little bad boy." I was attacked in print for describing Rizal in that way in a documentary I did a few years ago. But I didn't invent that moniker, as I'll explain below, if you don't know its origins already from previous posts in this blog.

Columnist John Nery led his latest piece with an anecdote about Rizal and his gift for forging loyal friendships. That got me recalling obscure Rizaliana which I happily shared over lunch with my balikbayan buddy Claro Penaranda, who resides in France but had never been to Rizal's haunts in Paris, one of our hero's favorite cities. And as is often the case, his eyes widened when the conversation turned to the 20-something overseas Pinoy's love life in Europe. I did not repeat to him the false rumor that Rizal had fathered Adolf Hitler via a "Viennese temptress," who was steamily described in the memoirs of his fellow expat Maximo Viola. (When Hitler was conceived, if you count back nine months from the future fascist's birthdate, Rizal was in London doing research on Morga.)

Instead, I told him about the tisay Nellie Boustead, the lovely daughter of a wealthy Frenchman married to a Pinay. Dashing Pepe and affable Nellie had fallen in love while the former was visiting the Boustead home in the French seaside resort town of Biarritz. Her father was a supporter of the Filipino exile community.

Rizal had been a rival of Antonio Luna for Nellie's charms, but won out over the temperamental Ilocano. She turned up in a famous photograph of Rizal fencing with the painter Juan Luna, Antonio's brother, in the latter's courtyard in a Parisian artists' community. Zoom in on the feminine face of the sitting figure in the corner and it is Nellie's lovestruck visage. According to a web page on Rizal's love life maintained by Jose Rizal University:

Rizal used to fence with the sisters at the studio of Juan Luna. Antonio Luna, Juan’s brother and also a frequent visitor of the Bousteads, courted Nellie but she was deeply infatuated with Rizal. In a party held by Filipinos in Madrid, a drunken Antonio Luna uttered unsavory remarks against Nellie Boustead. This prompted Rizal to challenge Luna into a duel. Fortunately, Luna apologized to Rizal, thus averting tragedy for the compatriots.

Their love affair unfortunately did not end in marriage. It failed because Rizal refused to be converted to the Protestant faith, as Nellie demanded and Nellie’s mother did not like a physician without enough paying clientele to be a son-in-law. The lovers, however, parted as good friends when Rizal left Europe.

When Rizal's family lost their Calamba estate to the friars and his brother Paciano could no longer send him a regular allowance, Rizal left Paris in 1890 and moved to Brussels, Belgium which had a lower cost of living. He stayed in a boarding house in a quiet neighborhood and this is where the historical accounts get interesting. From existing letters, it has been established that Rizal had carried on an affair with a certain Suzanne. Most historical accounts, including the web site on his love life mentioned above, advance the notion that this love interest was Suzanne Jacoby, one of the spinster sisters who managed the boarding house.

But a Belgian Rizal scholar I befriended in Belgium, Jean Paul (JP) Verstraeten, doubted this common account of Rizal's love life in Brussels. "Do you think Rizal would fall for a woman over 40 years old?" he asked mischievously. He also noted that the letters to Rizal were signed "petite Suzanne," convincing JP that she must have been the younger of two Suzanne's in the same house. And true enough, JP's research revealed that the spintster sisters had a niece staying with them at the time, 18-year-old Suzanne Thill from Luxembourg. In Brussels, the artistic Rizal also produced a sculpture of a petite woman's bust that he sent to a friend in Spain who wondered who the pretty young lass was who served as his model. JP is certain this must have been the infatuated "petite Suzanne."

When Rizal left Brussels to live in Spain, Suzanne pined for him in letters. In one of them, she wrote: "There will never be any home in which you are so loved as that in Brussels. So, you little bad boy, hurry back."

None of Rizal's letters to Suzanne Thill have been found, and JP is still searching. We may never know exactly why she called him a "little bad boy." But it does make our national hero come down to earth as a playful, perhaps even horny, expat bachelor in Europe.