It is amazing to read about the early years of Isabela Leonetti as a child. She seems to have been raised by her mother, her step-sisters and her two sisters in an atmosphere that promised all could be perfect. As a young woman, she seemed to have held onto that belief until her late thirties, when it seemed that everyone around her including her partner was going out of her way to make her fail at everything. She seemed to be cursed with an unhappy marriage that did not allow her the freedom or the independence that most women of her time enjoyed.
The curse seems to have continued into adulthood, and her lack of success in anything seemed to culminate in the loss of her husband. Isabela never fully recovered from the loss of her husband, and in the end, her nationalities would force her to marry a German soldier who came to live in France, even though it was illegal for him to do so. She finally managed to marry him, but it was too late, and she was very unhappy in her new country.
While the story of her marriage is entertaining and it does provide the reader with some interesting details about Isabelle’s early years, the greater tragedy is how everything went so wrong. She finally seemed to reach a decision to change her life, but it was too late for any type of transformation to take place. Her final fate was to live a long and unhappy life in Europe, where there was little to offer her beyond a pension. Only a fool would try to claim that they would have married a Frenchwoman if it had not been for the ugly experience of their marriage.