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 Adélaide 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