Maria Stella

Maria Stella (16 April 1773 – 23 December 1843) was the self-styled legitimate daughter of Louis Philip II, Duke of Orléans.

According to her, Louis-Philippe was not the son of Philip duke of Orleans, but a suppositious child, his father being one Lorenzo Chiappini, constable at the village of Modigliana in Tuscany. The story is that the duke and duchess of Orleans, travelling under the incognito of Comte and Comtesse de Joinville, were at this village on 16 April 1773, when the duchess gave birth to a daughter; and that the duke, desiring a son in order to prevent the rich Penthièvre inheritance from reverting to his wife's relations in the event of her death, bribed the Chiappinis to substitute their newborn male child for his own.

Maria Stella Petronilla Chiappini was born to an ordinary Italian family in 1773, in a small village called Modigliana in Tuscany. According to Maria's autobiography, she was treated poorly by her mother as a child, while her brothers and sisters gained all the attention. Years later after the death of her father, who had sent her a letter confessing that he was indeed not her biological father, she understood the treatment that she had been given by her mother and the Countess Camilla Borghi's kindness towards her.

Maria Stella, the supposed daughter of Chiappini, went on the stage at Florence, where her putative parents had settled, and there at the age of thirteen became the wife of the first Lord Newborough, after whose death she married in 1810 the Estonian Count Eduard Ungern-Sternberg.

On the death of her putative father in 1821 she received a letter, written by him shortly before his death, in which he confessed that she was not his daughter, adding "Heaven has repaired my fault, since you are in a better position than your real father, though he was of almost similar rank" (i.e. a French nobleman). Maria Stella henceforward devoted her time and fortune to establishing her identity.

Her first success was the judgment of the episcopal court at Faenza, which in 1824 declared that the Comte Louis de Joinville exchanged his daughter for the son of Lorenzo Chiappini, and that the Demoiselle de Joinville had been baptized as Maria Stella, with the false statement that she was the daughter of L Chiappini and his wife. The discovery that Joinville was a countship of the Orleans family, and a real or fancied resemblance of Louis Philippe to Chiappini, convinced her that the duke of Orleans was the person for whose sake she had been cheated of her birthright, a conviction strengthened by the striking resemblance which many people discovered in her to the princesses of the Orleans family.

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