THE WOMAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 8vo. viii pp, 318 pp, plus lithographed frontispiece portrait (almost always lacking!). Bound in contemporary blind-ruled English calf with unidentified armorial blind-stamped on both covers, with marbled endpapers and all edges marbled blue. Very light foxing, spine a little chipped at head and foot, otherwise an excellent copy complete with the often-lacking portrait. Rare first edition – immediately suppressed by the French police – of this remarkable autobiography of Maria Stella Wynn, Baroness Newborough (1773-1843), presenting her audacious claims to the French throne, and alleging in no mean terms that the newly-proclaimed King Louis-Philippe I was in fact a “garçon de la condition la plus vile”. Maria Stella’s scandalous accusations electrified the European aristocracy, and the present attractive English binding suggests that her account was also consumed in her adoptive country – although it was never (permitted to be?) translated into English. Earning her living on the Florentine stage from an early age, the 13-year old Maria Stella Chiappini caught the eye of the Welsh peer Thomas Wynn, 1st Baron Newborough, who after the death of his first wife had begun to spend much of his time in Italy. Maria’s parents were only too happy to marry her off to the 50-year old widower. From 1786-1810 she and her husband thus divided their time between London, North Wales, and Florence. Lord Newborough preferred to reside in Italy, but fell into trouble with the Florentine authorities over unpaid debts, was thrown in prison (Chapter IV), and the couple made their escape from the country soon thereafter by way of The Hague (Chapter V). In London, Wynn paraded his new wife around his circles as the Marchesina di Modigliana (“a name which I still bear in the almanacs of the English court”) before taking her to the family home in Glynllifon near Carnarvon, North Wales. After Lord Newborough’s death in 1807, Maria Stella remarried a Russian baron ten years her junior in Yorkshire, and ultimately made her way back to Lombardy in the 1820s by way of Estonia. There she made a startling discovery: just before his death, her father had composed a letter in which he revealed that Maria Stella was not his biological daughter. Rather, she had been traded in an exchange with a nobleman who desired a male heir. Finding that in 1773 a couple travelling under the name of Comte and Comtesse de Joinville had been at Modigliana, Maria Stella built up the story that these two were the Duc and Duchesse de Chartres, Louis Philippe Joseph, later Duc d’Orléans, and his wife, Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre, and that the Duc had exchanged a daughter for Chiappini’s son in order to keep the Penthièvre inheritance in his own house. The son whose parentage was thus contested was Louis Philippe, the Duc d’Orléans and later King of France. In July 1823, Maria Stella arrived in Paris and published a request in a newspaper for information about the birth of the Count and Countess de Joinville's son in Modigliana in 1773. She also paid a visit to the Palais Royal, where she found a portrait of Louis-Philippe which bore a striking resemblance to her own father and brother. Next, Stella’s detective work brought her back to Italy, where she decided to compile testimonials from contemporary witnesses of the exchange: a monk named Brisighella, an old hairdresser, the former bodyguard of the Bishop of Ravenna, and so on. Having complete her fact-finding missions, Maria Stella was ready to deliver her story to the world and claim her rightful inheritance. The episcopal tribunal in Faenza began to hear the case, and on May 29, 1824, a decision was made to amend the official records of Stella’s birth, acknowledging her as the daughter of the Count and Countess de Joinville. However, the court crucially rejected the identification of the Count de Joinville with the Duc de Chartres. Maria Stella and her half-Russian son, ‘Ned’, moved to Genoa, hired a lawyer to obtain new evidence, and on March 2, 1825, she published the story of her mysterious birth in Gazeta di Genova. The Genoese authorities wanted no part in Stella’s agitations, and expelled her from the city, whereupon she took up residence in Nice. Now in her mid-fifties, Stella finally sought the help of her husband Baron Ungern-Sternberg, who supplied her with an English lawyer resident in Paris. But rather than assisting Stella with her legal proceedings, the lawyer merely re-organized her affairs to ensure that she was deprived of her fortune and inheritance. Impoverished and having severed ties with her lawyer, Maria Stella filed one last application with the Paris court on June 17, 1830. As a young copyist for the Duke’s lawyer, Alexandre Dumas writes at length in his memoirs (Chapter LXXXII) of the Maria Stella affair – and while pointing out that she was clearly insane, he does acknowledge that many of the facts presented seemed to support her case. According to later accounts, Stella would paste translucent images of herself and members of the Orléans family on the windows of her apartment to demonstrate to passers-by the remarkable similarities. She printed and distributed leaflets containing attacks on King Louis Louis-Philippe and fancifully signed them "Maria Étoile d'Orléans". Maria Stella’s Échange Criminel d'une Demoiselle must have been published in 1830 just before her final application to the court. Charles X promptly ordered “au général Trogof de confisquer tous les exemplaires des mémoires de Maria Stella, libelle dirigé contre le duc d’Orléans, et que les courtisans faisaient circuler à Saint-Cloud avec une joie maligne.” (Louis Blanc, Histoire de Dix Ans, Vol I, p. 404). The July Revolution in the same year, resulting in the Duke of Orléans being proclaimed as King Louis-Philippe I on 7 August, sealed the fate of Stella’s claims once and for all. She died in poverty and obscurity in Paris in 1843. OCLC shows seven copies of this first edition in American libraries: Cornell, Fordham, NYPL, UC Irvine, Kentucky, Michigan State, and Princeton. COPAC shows the NLS and the BL only. However, we note – judging by the number of portrait-less copies for sale online – that copies are frequently encountered incomplete; later editions of 1838 etc. seem not to have been issued with the portrait at all. No contemporary English translation of Stella’s account was ever (allowed to be?) published. * cf Sir Ralph Payne Gallwey's Mystery of Maria Stella, Lady Newborough (London, 1907); and cf the excellent entry on Stella in the Encyclopedia Britannica.