In setting forth the strong arguments in my own favour, I have also considered those that might be urged against me, and I hasten to answer them.
1st. “In his letter Chiappini said that I was born in a position almost similar to, but still lower than that given me by my marriage to Lord Newborough. Yet how great a difference between them! How superior was the first to the second, if I really had the honour of belonging to the august house of Orleans.”
This mistake can be corrected in a few words.
Every one must see how extremely important it was to guard against any indiscretion on the part of the jailer, perhaps even such involuntary revelations as his pride in the lofty position of his son might draw from him.
Every sort of precaution, therefore, was taken to keep him in ignorance of the exalted rank of the Sieur de Joinville, whom he never knew but as a rich nobleman simply bearing the title of Count, a title so common in Italy that no one pays any attention to it, so to speak.
It was by this title he must have called my true father, in order to do away with milord’s constant suspicions, when he came to London; and my husband, knowing more about the French nobility than he did, and having a notion that I might have its blood in my veins, gave me his commands, then so inconceivable, to avoid the great people of that nation,[56] fearing, no doubt, that some unlooked-for circumstance might let me discover my origin through them, which would infallibly have parted me for ever from him whose only means of overcoming my insurmountable repugnance was his perpetual references to the low estate from which he claimed to have raised me.
2nd. “Does it not seem strange that the Duc de Chartres, anxious to consign an atrocious crime to everlasting oblivion, should have assumed a name belonging to his family, and one so easily recognizable?”
There is nothing to prove that when he first came to live at Modigliana, under the name of Comte de Joinville, he had formed the fatal plan. Perhaps the simultaneous pregnancy of his wife and Chiappini’s may have really given him the first idea.
