1907
Victoria meets Bernando de Estrada (Monaco), the son of an aristocratic and very catholic family. She falls in love but is filled with doubts about the prospect of marriage: “Can you imagine me buried beneath domestic worries?”, she writes to her friend Delfina.

1908
The Ocampos travel to Europe, where they will remain for two years. Fani, the maid that will accompany Victoria for the rest of her life, begins working for the family. Victoria attends the Sorbonne, where she studies Dante and Saint Augustine and takes lessons with Henri Bergson.

1909
In Paris, the prestigious painter Helleu, renowned for his studies of elegant women, creates a series of exquisite portraits of Victoria. Together with Angelica and her uncles, Victoria travels to England and Scotland: “I drank in the entirety of Scotland with its bagpipes, its tartans, the Lomond Halyrood lake, Melrose and Walter Scott.” She begins a friendship with Edmond Rostand’s son, Maurice.

1910
Dagnan Bouveret completes a portrait of Victoria. She is depicted holding a book of the works of Samain, given to her by Monaco moments before her voyage to Europe.

1911
Victoria returns to Buenos Aires. Clara Ocampo dies of infantile diabetes.

1912
Victoria and Monaco Estrada are married. In December they leave for their honeymoon in Europe. In the middle of the outbound journey Victoria finds a letter from Monaco to her father, in which her husband reassures the senior Ocampo that all of his daughter’s fantasies of becoming an actress would disappear as soon as she became pregnant. Victoria writes: “I married a traitor.”

1913
In Paris, Victoria sees Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. She meets Ricardo Güiraldes and his wife Adelina del Carril. Some years later, Güiraldes would base the protagonist of his novel Xiamaca on Victoria. In Rome, three days before her birthday, Victoria meets Monaco’s cousin Julián Martinez, a diplomat who according to the writer Mujica Lainez was “the most handsome man of the era.” Victoria writes that “when I first saw him from afar his presence overwhelmed me… we only greeted one another briefly that night, amid the crowd. But I watched him as if I were afraid of never seeing him again.”

1914
Victoria returns to Buenos Aires. She and her husband move into a house on Tucumán street, but they reside on different floors and interact only in social settings in order to maintain appearances. The prince Troubezkoy creates a sculpture based on a portrait of Victoria, which today can be seen at the Villa Ocampo. Victoria reads André Gide’s translation of Gitanjali, written by Rabindranath Tagore.

1916
José Ortega y Gasset arrives in Buenos Aires and meets Victoria. She recalls: “upon meeting Ortega I was struck by his effervescent intelligence, which I had to take in in tiny sips because of the mineral-water-like tickle it produced in me.” Ortega, in turn, is captivated by this “Gioconda of the pampas.”

1920
On April 4, Victoria publishes her first article in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación. Titled “Babel,” it is a commentary on the inequality that exists between human beings. She is separated from Monaco and lives alone in an apartment on Montevideo street. She begins a relationship with Julián Martinez that would last thirteen years. “Her secret buy real marriage” according to her biographer M.E. Vázquez.

1921
Encouraged by Martinez, she composes the text “De Francesca a Beatrice,” which Ortega y Gasset would publish in 1924 in the Revista de Occidente.

1 - 2 - 3 - 4