Maria Stella, ou échange criminal d’une demoiselle du plus haut rang contre un garçon

Paris: Chez les Principaux Libraires, 1830. FIRST EDITION. Lithographed frontispiece portrait, lacking in most copies. Contemporary half gilt blue morocco over marbled boards, top edge gilt, green silk marker. Ex-libris bookplate of T. Froissart. Some minor foxing, otherwise a very nice copy. First edition of this curious autobiography written by a noblewoman convinced that she was the rightful heir to the French throne. Although published in Paris, the French police almost immediately suppressed this book’s dissemination to the public due to the audacious claims made therein.
Maria Stella Chiappini was born into an unwealthy household in Modigliana, nearTuscany; her father was a jailer and her mother “barbaric.” They forced her into stage performance in the Venetian opera at age 13, where she caught the eye of Englishman Thomas Wynn, the First Baron Newborough. Maria Stella’s parents were thrilled to marry her off to the much older baron. He died in 1807, leaving his enormous fortune to Maria Stella, who quickly remarried a younger Russian baron. In 1821, while traveling in Italy, she learned of the death of her father, and found a letter he wrote alleging that she was not his daughter. He claimed that a noble French couple found themselves in Modigliana when the wife gave birth to a daughter, not the son they desired. Maria Stella’s “mother” had just given birth to a son, and they arranged to swap babies if the French couple paid them handsomely. Maria Stella immediately attempted to discover her true parents, squandering her fortune hiring lawyers, notaries, and seers who claimed they could assist in her investigation and traveling across Europe in search of documentation. About half the text recounts this wild ride. She convinced herself that her birth parents were Philippe d’Orléans, cousin of Louis XVI, and his wife Louis Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon. Their legitimate son, Louis Philippe, became King the same year this book was published, and Maria Stella asserts here that he is a usurper, “a boy of the most vile condition.”
Maria Stella moved to Paris to further her campaign for the throne, rebranding herself “Marie-Étoile d’Orléans.” She would post caricatures of the king and written insults against him in the windows of her apartments. She went quite mad and refused to leave home for the last five years of her life, fearing retribution from the king.
Oberlé, Petite nécropole littéraire ch. 91.