Upon receipt of this letter, Maria-Stella at once prepared to travel to Italy. She did not agree with the gaoler Chiappini in thinking the matter irremediable: she wished to know who was her true father. She gathered information wherever she could find it, and at length she learned that in 1772—in other words, a year before her birth—two French travellers arrived at Modigliana, and remained there until the month of April 1773. These two travellers called themselves the Comte and Comtesse de Joinville. Upon this slight clue, the Baroness de Sternberg set off to France, and began by visiting the little town of Joinville, whose name her father bore. Here she learnt that Joinville had once been an inheritance belonging to the Orléans family, and that Duc Louis-Philippe-Joseph, who had been travelling in Italy in 1772, had died upon the scaffold in 1793.
Only his son, the Duc d'Orléans, was left (the two younger brothers having died, the Duc de Montpensier in England and the Duc de Beaujolais at Malta), the inheritor of the whole of his father's wealth. He lived in Paris, and he was the only prince of the blood of the house of Orléans.
Maria-Stella left immediately for Paris, made useless efforts to gain access to the duke himself, gave herself into the hands of intriguing persons who exploited her cause, to business men who cheated her, and ended by writing to the papers, stating that the Baroness de Sternberg, who was the bearer of a communication of the greatest importance to the heirs of the Comte de Joinville, had arrived in Paris, and desired to acquaint them with this communication at the earliest possible opportunity.
The Duc d'Orléans did not wish to receive this communication direct; neither did he desire to have recourse to the agency of a business man: he commissioned his uncle, the old Abbé of Saint-Phar, to call on the baroness.[1] Then everything was laid bare, and the duke discovered the whole plot that was being weaved about him. Learning that, whether from honest belief or from cupidity, Maria-Stella seriously meant to pursue her cause, and that she was going to return to Italy to furnish herself with documents wherewith to establish her identity, he hastened to take the precaution of preparing a memoir, intended for his counsel, to refute the fabrication by the aid of which Maria-Stella intended to take away his rank and his fortune, or at all events to make him pay for the right to keep them. In the meantime, she was appealing to the Duchesse d'Angoulême as the likeliest person to harbour the liveliest feelings of resentment against the Orléans family.
It was this memoir that I was called upon to copy. I must own that I did not transcribe it without reading it, although my total ignorance of history left many points obscure to me in the prince's refutation. Not only was this paper based upon fact, but it was written with that customary power of reasoning which the Duc d'Orléans was noted for exercising, even in minor matters of diplomacy. He employed counsel for form's sake only, for he himself drew up not merely notes on the case he wished to prove, but lengthy statements, which roused the admiration of the celebrated barrister Me. Dupin, to whom they were always sent.
I came to the end of the portion the duke had told me to write, after a couple of hours' work; so I put down my work and waited. When the duke returned, he came to the table at which I was writing, picked up my copy, made a gesture indicative of his approval of my handwriting, but almost immediately afterwards said—
"Oh! oh! you have a punctuation of your own, I see;" and taking a pen, he sat down at a corner of the table and began to punctuate my copy according to the rules of grammar.
The duke flattered me highly by saying I had a punctuation of my own. I knew no more about punctuation than about anything else: I punctuated according to my fancy, or rather, I did not punctuate at all. To this day, I only punctuate on my proofs: I believe you could take up any of my manuscripts hap-hazard and run through a whole volume without finding a single exclamation mark, or an acute accent or a grave accent. After the duke had read the statement and corrected my punctuation, he got up and, walking up and down, dictated to me the part he wanted to correct. I wrote almost as quickly as he dictated, which seemed to please him extremely. I reached this sentence: "And if there were nothing else but the striking resemblance which exists between the Duc d'Orléans and his illustrious grandfather Louis XIV., would not that likeness alone be sufficient to demonstrate the falseness of this adventuress's pretensions?"
Although, as I have previously stated, I was not very well read in history, yet in this matter I knew quite enough (as they say in duelling of a man who has had three months' training in a fencing school) to make a fool of myself—that is to say, I knew that M. le Duc d'Orléans was descended from Monsieur, that Monsieur was the son of Louis XIII. and brother of Louis XIV., and that, consequently, Louis XIV., being Monsieur's brother, could not be the grandfather of the Duc d'Orléans, who was honouring me by dictating to me a memorandum against Maria-Stella's claim. So, when he came to these words, "And if there were nothing else but the striking resemblance which exists between the Duc d'Orléans and his illustrious grandfather Louis XIV." I looked up. It was most impertinent of me! A prince is never mistaken, and in this instance the prince did not allow himself to be taken in.
So, the Duc d'Orléans stopped in front of me and said to me, "Dumas, you should know this: when a person is descended from Louis XIV. even if only through bastards, it is a sufficiently great honour to boast about!... Proceed."