For centuries, Orléans has been maligned as one of the villains of the French Revolution, a member of the ruling Bourbon family who sent his own cousin, Louis XVI, to the guillotine. But Orléans’s relationship with his family had been a complex one long before the first stirrings of revolution. He had never seen eye to eye with the court and his relationship with Marie Antoinette was notoriously bitter. This, and his vast wealth (which was in part due to his wife’s enormous dowry), made him an obvious person around whom those opposed to the King could rally. For a time, Orléans was celebrated as ‘the Godfather of the Revolution’, the man who funded Danton and Marat and who opened his palace to the people of Paris, but politics was never his passion. Ultimately, the Revolution forced him to make a terrible choice: whether he would sacrifice his own life and, inevitably, the lives of his family and friends, or that of the King. He came to regret what he did for the rest of his foreshortened days.

When Henrietta meets Orléans he has parted with both his wife and the most famous of all of his mistresses, Madame de Genlis, a talented writer and educator. His power is on the wane. As he was required to pay back his Duchess’s dowry, Orléans was indeed strapped for cash in the final years of his life, and after his death in November 1793 the Palais-Royal was stripped bare of its remaining treasures by the Revolutionary government.

Orléans’s sons, the Dukes of Chartres and Montpensier and the Count of Beaujolais, escaped the guillotine by going into an exile worthy of the pages of an Alexandre Dumas novel. They wandered Europe and the Americas and lived for a time outside Richmond, Surrey. Eventually, Louis Philippe (Orléans’s eldest) returned to France to be made ‘King of the French’ in 1830. Henrietta would have lived to see this and, after witnessing Orléans’s torments, I have no doubt that it would have made her smile.

Marguerite Françoise ‘Agnès’ de Buffon, née Bouvier de la Mothe Cepoy (1767–1808)