At half past five on the evening of November 6, 1832, police raided a house in a quiet residential enclave of Nantes, the largest city in France’s western region. Shoving past frightened servants, they moved methodically from room to room, overturning beds and rifling through wardrobes, as twelve hundred soldiers—two entire army regiments—filed into the dark cobblestone streets below to make sure nobody could escape out the back. They were searching for the duchesse de Berry, the most wanted woman in France.

The mother of the heir to the throne, the duchesse de Berry had been forced into exile with the rest of the Bourbon royal family after the Revolution of 1830, only to return two years later to launch a bloody civil war. Her dream was to reconquer the kingdom for her eleven-year-old son. All through the spring she had commanded a guerrilla army in a series of battles against the government, but by the early summer she was on the run.

And now, after six months of evading capture, the luck of the four-foot-seven duchess was coming to an end.

The police had been tipped off by the duchess’ confidant, a seductive yet volatile man named Simon Deutz. He had pledged undying loyalty to her cause, then turned against her once it appeared that her campaign would fail. For a large cash reward, he had agreed to lead the police to her hiding place in Nantes. But when the agents forced their way into the house, the duchess was nowhere to be found.

Just minutes before, she had slipped into a secret closet behind the fireplace in the attic. Created during the Reign of Terror to save priests from the guillotine, the closet was so small that the duchess and her three accomplices could barely stand up straight, and there was not an inch of space between them. Praying for a miracle, she tried not to move while the agents sounded the walls and knocked holes in the roof. She could hear the police commissioner cursing on the other side of the thin partition as he ordered his men to reduce the house to rubble in their efforts to find her.

After sixteen hours, the agents were about to give up the search when one of the soldiers standing guard in the room decided to light a fire. The secret compartment filled with smoke and the walls glowed red with heat.

Eventually, the trapdoor to the fireplace opened, and out crawled the tiny, soot-covered rebel. Straightening her scorched dress and shielding her eyes from the light, she declared in the most regal manner she could summon: “I am the duchesse de Berry. You are French soldiers. I entrust myself to your honor!”

Though largely forgotten today, the betrayal of the duchess shocked the world at the time. It made international headlines and engrossed the public for months, all the more so when it emerged that the arrested duchess was pregnant, despite not having had a husband for over a decade.

While imprisoned at the Citadel of Blaye, the duchess’ main occupation was dissimulating her pregnancy. In response to the right wing’s concerns about her failing health and hoping to bring her condition to light, the government insisted that she see a doctor. The duchess eventually submitted to an examination on December 11, 1832, once she realized that the chosen practitioner, Dr. Gintrac of Bordeaux, was a legitimist, or a supporter of the ousted Bourbon dynasty. Gintrac proved willing to play along with the duchess’ charade. In his official report to the ministers, he noted a few symptoms that were consistent with pregnancy but refrained from drawing the obvious conclusions.

Once the government realized that the duchess was not going to admit the pregnancy and that they had to wait until her condition became too obvious to deny, the new minister of the interior, Antoine d’Argout, decided it was time to find a stricter governor of the citadel than Colonel Martial Chousserie. His replacement, Thomas Robert Bugeaud, marquis de la Piconnerie and duc d’Isly, was a career officer who had fought in Algeria and served every regime with equal fidelity: the Empire, the Restoration, and now the July Monarchy. Accompanied to the citadel by his wife and two young daughters, Bugeaud attempted, as he put it, “to exploit the feminine character” of the duchess in order to trick her into revealing her pregnancy. In his almost daily reports, he evaluated her every mood, expressing surprise whenever she seemed lighthearted given the heavy weight of the secret he was certain she concealed. He also noted every degree of expansion in her waistline. On February 6 he remarked that the various illnesses that the duchess claimed she suffered from to mask her condition were inconsistent with her otherwise perfect health.

“Everyone who sees her agrees that it’s becoming more apparent every day,” Bugeaud wrote, referring to her pregnancy. “In two or three months the problem will be resolved.”

Fearing that the legitimist supporters who gathered to catch a glimpse of her on the ramparts would discover the truth, the duchess insisted on wrapping herself in heavy garments on her walks and then stopped taking walks altogether. Her supporters grew worried that the harsh climate had caused the duchess to become seriously ill, and they pressed Dr. Gintrac to disclose particulars about the state of her health. Although he refused to reveal any details, word of the duchess’ “interesting condition” began to spread.

The legitimists vehemently denied what one right-wing newspaper referred to as “the vague rumors…concerning the enlargement of Madame.” The reporter for La Mode began his January 28, 1833, dispatch from Blaye by addressing concerns over the duchess’ health: “It now appears certain that the climate, and especially the air that Madame is forced to breathe on the rock of the citadel, is in no way suited to her temperament or to her delicate complexion.” He then addressed the ever-expanding elephant in the ever-shrinking room, saying, “We have never dared to entertain the infamous rumors that are being spread here about that most noble and admirable of mothers, not wanting to lend our echo to that horrible calumny.” The journalist insisted that the rumors must be false for the simple reason that the government wanted them to be true. He concluded by resorting to the time-honored tactic of turning the tables on the duchess’ accusers: “We would never have thought that political hatreds would have led to the use of such execrable means to assure the triumph of such an unworthy cause.”

Unsurprisingly, self-righteous denials such as this did not succeed in halting the rumor mill. During this heyday of political journalism in France the duchess’ pregnancy became the topic of endless discussion. The only thing left for the legitimists to do was fight.

On January 29 the satirical newspaper Le Corsaire—which had been among the first to allude to the duchess’ condition—published an unmistakable reference to the pregnancy. The next day, a young nobleman presented himself at the newspaper’s offices and challenged the author of the article, Eugène Briffault, to a duel. The encounter, with pistols, took place at dawn in a clearing in the Bois de Boulogne, the large park on the western edge of Paris. The legitimist officer was a better shot than the journalist. After wounding his adversary in the arm, the young nobleman supposedly remarked, “He won’t be writing anything more for a while.”

After the legitimists accused their rivals of lying about the pregnancy, the left-leaning Le National demanded that they submit a list of twelve names so they could fight twelve duels over the allegations. On February 2, 1833, the first of these duels was fought by Armand Carrel, the director of Le National, against Roux Laborie of the legitimist newspaper Le Revenant. Carrel was gravely wounded, but the left was undeterred. “On the field of honor, we did not emerge victorious,” Le Corsaire wrote of its own lost duels. “But, in applying the first bandage to our wound, we kept repeating, ‘She is still pregnant!’ ”

Frustrated by Dr. Gintrac’s vague reports, the minister of the interior sent two new doctors, Orfila and Auvity, to Blaye in late January. But their report was also inconclusive concerning the question on everyone’s mind. By this point, the duchess was almost five months pregnant.

Before the invention of diagnostic imaging techniques, determination of pregnancy was not a straightforward matter. Although experienced doctors could measure the distance from the pubic bone to the uterus (fundal height), it was theoretically possible to conceal a pregnancy until around eighteen to twenty weeks, when the baby would begin to move and the heartbeat could be heard with a wooden stethoscope. That moment was fast approaching for the duchess.

On February 22 the duchess shocked her captors, her defenders, and everyone else in France by announcing to General Bugeaud that she was married. The government’s official paper, Le Moniteur universel, published the text of her declaration on February 26: “Pressed by circumstances and by the measures put in place by the government, and despite the fact that I have the most serious reasons for wanting to keep my marriage secret, I believe I owe it to myself, as well as to my children, to declare that I was married secretly during my stay in Italy.” The duchess concocted the fake marriage announcement in desperation to lessen the scandal that the imminent revelation of her pregnancy would cause. She did not reveal the name of her supposed husband because she did not yet know it.

But her plan backfired in a spectacular manner. When word of the announcement reached Paris, it caused eyebrows across the capital to raise, as the duchess’ supporters finally realized that the rumors must really be true. “The public’s modesty was offended,” the comtesse de Boigne reports, “because everyone read pregnancy in the place of marriage.”

As far as her advisers were concerned, she could not have done anything worse: not only did the declaration of marriage indirectly confirm her pregnancy, but it also disqualified her from acting as the head of the legitimist party. How could the duchess act as regent for her son if she were the wife of another man, and an Italian to boot? It was a disaster for her party, a legitimist Waterloo.

During the night of May 10, the duchess felt a sharp pain and realized what it portended. After a short labor, at precisely 3:20 am, the duchess produced a baby girl. The newborn was slightly premature and small but healthy. Her ordeal was almost over. There was only one more formality remaining. “Let the gentlemen enter,” she said. The president of the Tribunal of Blaye, accompanied by the subprefect, a justice of the peace, and several other dignitaries, stood in a solemn semicircle around the duchess’ bed.

“Is this Madame la duchesse de Berry to whom I have the honor of speaking?” the judge asked.

“Oui, Monsieur,” she answered.

“The child that I see there, placed on your bed, is it your child?”

“Oui, Monsieur.”

“What is its sex?”

“It is a girl.”

Their dialogue complete, the gentlemen left the room. But if the formalities were over, the duchess had not yet finished. She still had one card up her sleeve or, rather, under her pillow. To the shock of everyone assembled, she said to Dr. Deneux, with calm poise but taking care to enunciate every word, “When you declare the birth, make sure to name the child’s father. I want to make sure it is written on the birth certificate.” And from under her bolster she removed a piece of paper that she handed to the doctor. It contained the name of the duchess’ new husband: Count Ettore (Hector) Lucchesi-Palli, prince of Campo-Franco, gentleman of the chamber of the king of the Two Sicilies, domiciled in Palermo.

She may have lost her war and given birth in prison, but her baby would have a legal father after all. It did not matter that nobody believed her story that she and Hector had known each other as children (in fact, he was eight years her junior), or her story that they had married secretly in Massa as she planned her campaign, or that she had slipped out of hiding in Nantes to pay him a clandestine visit in The Hague, where he was stationed as a diplomat and where the baby was supposedly conceived the prior August. She had saved at least a measure of face.

Excerpted from The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern by Maurice Samuels. Copyright © 2020 by Maurice Samuels. Available from Basic Books.

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