Excerpt from A Princess of Adventure Marie Caroline, Duchesse De Berry The nineteenth century, so fertile in interesting feminine personalities, contains no more romantic figure than that of Marie Caroline, Duchesse de Berry. Few princesses have experienced such strange vicissitudes, and few have faced misfortune and danger with so much courage and sang-froid. "Dans la tete de cette heroique princesse il y a de quoi a faire vingt rois!" exclaimed the celebrated advocate Berryer during the insurrection of 1832 in la Vendee; and he was not far from the truth. Born at the Palace of Caserta, near Naples, on November 5, 1798, Marie Caroline lived to within a few months of the fall of the Second Empire, dying at the Chateau of Brunnsee, in Styria, on April 16, 1870. But it is only with what may be termed her public career, which ended with her release from the citadel of Blaye and her final departure from France in June 1833, that this work is concerned. To have attempted to deal with the whole of her long and eventful life within the scope of a single volume would have involved the omission of much which serves to justify the title of "A Princess of Adventure." Moreover, it is a task which has never yet been successfully undertaken. In my endeavour to give a full and impartial account of the early life of the Duchesse de Berry, and of the historical events in which she was more or less directly concerned, I have consulted practically all the chief contemporary sources of information - some of which have only seen the light within recent years - and also a very large number of more modern works and review articles. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."