The marriage announcement.
"Urged by circumstances, and by the measures ordered by the Government, though I had the strongest reason to keep my marriage secret, I think it a duty to myself and my children to declare that I was secretly married during my residence in Italy."
To a friend, M. de Mesnard, she wrote: "I feel as if it would kill me to tell you what follows, but it must be done. Vexatious annoyances, the order to leave me alone with spies, the certainty that I can not get out till September, could alone have determined me to declare my secret marriage."
Humiliations of the duchess.
The humiliations to which the unhappy duchess was compelled to submit were dreadful. The detail would be only painful to our readers. On the morning of the 10th of May a daughter was born, whom God kindly, ere long, removed to another world. The fact, minutely authenticated, was proclaimed to all Europe. Thus far Marie Caroline had kept secret the name of her husband. But it was now necessary that his name should be given, to secure the legitimacy of her child. It was then announced, by the officiating physician to the group of officials which the Government had placed around her bed, that the father of the child was Count Hector Sucheri Palli, gentleman of the chamber to the King of the Two Sicilies.
Comments of Louis Blanc.
In commenting upon these events, Louis Blanc writes: "The partisans of the new dynasty exulted with indecent zeal at the event of which the ministers had so well prepared the scandal. The Republicans only manifested the contempt they felt for this ignoble triumph. As for the Legitimists, they were overwhelmed with consternation. Some of them, however, still persisted in their daring incredulity; and they did not hesitate to denounce the document, upon which their enemies relied as the denouement of an intrigue which had begun with violence and ended with a lie. Separated from her friends, deprived of their counsels, dead to the world, to the laws, to society, was it possible for Marie Caroline to make any valid deposition against herself, and that, too, surrounded by her accusers, by her keepers, by the men who had vowed her destruction?"
Thus, while one party affirmed that there was no truth in the alleged birth or marriage, the Orleanists declared that the Duchess of Berri had not only given birth to a child of no legitimate parentage, but that the Duke of Bordeaux, who was born seven months after the assassination of the Duke of Berri, was also the child of dishonored birth, and had, therefore, no title whatever to the crown. Such is the venom of political partisanship.