There used to be stories floating about Paris concerning Louis Philippe’s birth and parentage,—­stories, however, not to be believed, and which broke down upon investigation.  These made him out to be the son of an Italian jailer, exchanged for a little girl who had been born to the Duke of Orleans and his wife at a time when it was a great object with them to have a son.  The little girl grew up in the jailer Chiappini’s house under the name of Maria Stella Petronilla.  There is little doubt that she was a changeling, but the link is imperfect which would connect her with the Duke and Duchess of Orleans.  She was ill-treated by the jailer’s wife, but was very beautiful.  Lord Newburgh, an English nobleman, saw her and married her.  Her son succeeded his father as a peer of England.  After Lord Newburgh’s death his widow married a Russian nobleman.  Chiappini on his death-bed confessed to this lady all he knew about her origin, and she persuaded herself that her father must have been the Duke of Orleans.  She took up her residence in the Rue Rivoli, overlooking the gardens of the Tuileries, and received some small pension from the benevolent royal family of France.  She died in 1845.

But whoever the mother of Louis Philippe may have been, she whom he and Madame Adelaide looked up to and loved as though she had been their second mother, was Madame de Genlis.  In her company Louis Philippe witnessed, with boyish exultation, the destruction of the Bastile.  To her he wrote after the great day when in the Champ de Mars the new Constitution was sworn to both by king and people:  “Oh, my mother! there are but two things that I supremely love,—­the new constitution and you!”

On Christmas Day, 1809, he married at Palermo the Princesse Marie Amelie, niece to Marie Antoinette, and aunt to the future Duchesse de Berri.

No breath of scandal ever disturbed the matrimonal happiness of Louis Philippe and Marie Amelie.  They had a noble family of five sons and three daughters, all distinguished by their ability and virtues.  I shall have to tell hereafter how devotion to the interests of his family was one cause of Louis Philippe’s overthrow.

In 1814, when Napoleon abdicated at Fontainebleau; Louis Philippe left Palermo, attended only by one servant, and made his way to Paris and the home of his family, the Palais Royal.  He hurried into the house, and in spite of the opposition of the concierge, who took him for a madman, he rushed to the staircase; but before he ascended it he fell upon his knees, and bursting into tears, kissed the first step before him.

This was probably the most French-like thing in Louis Philippe’s career.  He was far more like an Englishman than a Frenchman.  Had he been an English prince, his faults would have seemed to his people like virtues.

Of course the son of Egalite could be no favorite with the elder Bourbons; but he soon became the hope of the middle classes, and was very intimate with Laffitte the banker, and with Lafayette, who, as we have seen, were both implicated in conspiracies seven years before the Revolution of 1830.  He was for many years not rich, but he and the ladies of his house were very charitable.  Madame Adelaide, speaking one day to a friend[1] of the reports that were circulated concerning her brother’s parsimony, said,—­