Upon receipt of this letter, Maria-Stella at once prepared to travel to Italy. She did not agree with the gaoler Chiappini in thinking the matter irremediable: she wished to know who was her true father. She gathered information wherever she could find it, and at length she learned that in 1772--in other words, a year before her birth--two French travellers arrived at Modigliana, and remained there until the month of April 1773. These two travellers called themselves the Comte and Comtesse de Joinville. Upon this slight clue, the Baroness de Sternberg set off to France, and began by visiting the little town of Joinville, whose name her father bore. Here she learnt that Joinville had once been an inheritance belonging to the Orléans family, and that Duc Louis-Philippe-Joseph, who had been travelling in Italy in 1772, had died upon the scaffold in 1793. Only his son, the Duc d'Orléans, was left (the two younger brothers having died, the Duc de Montpensier in England and the Duc de Beaujolais at Malta), the inheritor of the whole of his father's wealth. He lived in Paris, and he was the only prince of the blood of the house of Orléans. Maria-Stella left immediately for Paris, made useless efforts to gain access to the duke himself, gave herself into the hands of intriguing persons who exploited her cause, to business men who cheated her, and ended by writing to the papers, stating that the Baroness de Sternberg, who was the bearer of a communication of the greatest importance to the heirs of the Comte de Joinville, had arrived in Paris, and desired to acquaint them with this communication at the earliest possible opportunity. The Duc d'Orléans did not wish to receive this communication direct; neither did he desire to have recourse to the agency of a business man: he commissioned his uncle, the old Abbé of Saint-Phar, to call on the baroness.[1] Then everything was laid bare, and the duke discovered the whole plot that was being weaved about him. Learning that, whether from honest belief or from cupidity, Maria-Stella seriously meant to pursue her cause, and that she was going to return to Italy to furnish herself with documents wherewith to establish her identity, he hastened to take the precaution of preparing a memoir, intended for his counsel, to refute the fabrication by the aid of which Maria-Stella intended to take away his rank and his fortune, or at all events to make him pay for the right to keep them. In the meantime, she was appealing to the Duchesse d'Angoulême as the likeliest person to harbour the liveliest feelings of resentment against the Orléans family.