Antoinette Van Leer Polk, Baroness de Charette (October 27, 1847 – February 3, 1919) was an American Southern belle in the Antebellum South and (by marriage) French aristocrat in the Gilded Age.

She was born into the planter elite, the great-niece of the 11th President of the United States James K. Polk and a member of the influential Van Leer family through her mother.

She was an heiress to plantations in Tennessee and a "Southern heroine" who warned Confederate soldiers of advancing Union troops during the American Civil War.

After the war, she moved to Europe, where she took to foxhunting in the Roman Campagna of Italy and the English countryside, and later became a baroness and socialite in Paris and Brittany.

[13] In Italy, Polk met her future husband, General Baron Athanase-Charles-Marie Charette de la Contrie, then a Commander of the Papal Zouaves.

[12] The couple had two children, Louise Marie, born in or near Genoa, Italy in 1866, raised by a series of governesses and later quietly married to Angelo Schinoni, possibly a relative of the midwife and governess who had delivered her,[17] and Charles Antoine, later known as Antoine de Charette, born in or near Paris in 1869, who was first engaged to Gladys Spencer-Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough,[12] and later married Susan Henning of Shelby County, Kentucky,[18][19][20] the daughter of James W. Henning, a stockbroker on the New York Stock Exchange,[21] in a lavish society wedding at the St. Patrick's Cathedral.