She was the youngest daughter of Louis Jean Marie de Bourbon, Duke of Penthièvre and his wife, Princess Maria Teresa d'Este.

However, when the Prince de Lamballe's death left his sister sole heiress to the family fortune, the bar sinister on her inescutcheon was "overlooked".

Although Marie-Adélaîde was much in love with her Orléans cousin, Louis XV warned Penthièvre against such a marriage because of the reputation of the young Duke of Chartres as a libertine.

On that day, she was baptised by Charles Antoine de La Roche-Aymon, Grand Almoner of France, and given the names Louise Marie Adélaïde.

Teacher and pupils left the Palais-Royal and went to live in a house built specially for them on the grounds of the Couvent des Dames de Bellechasse in Paris.

She sometimes smiled, she never laughed[11]Upon the death of her father-in-law Louis Philippe d'Orléans in November 1785, her husband became the new Duke of Orléans, and First Prince of the Blood, taking rank only after the immediate family of the king.

On 5 April 1791, Marie-Adélaïde left her husband,[3] and went to live with her father at the château de Bizy[12] overlooking Vernon, Eure in Normandy[13] In September 1792, having sided with the Revolution, the Duke of Orléans was elected to the National Convention under the name of Philippe Égalité.

Siding with the radical group called La Montagne, he was from the very beginning suspect in the eyes of the Girondists, who wanted all the Bourbons to be banished from France.

The fate of the Orléans family was sealed when Marie-Adélaïde's eldest son, the duc de Chartres, "Général Égalité" in the Army of the North commanded by Charles François Dumouriez, sought political asylum from the Austrians in March 1793.

[3] Later, the two were transferred to the prison of Fort Saint-Jean in Marseille, where they were soon joined by the duc de Montpensier who had been arrested while serving as an officer in the Army of the Alps.

[3] In the meantime, due to her poor health, Marie-Adélaïde was allowed to stay in France, under guard, at the château de Bizy, where her father had died a month earlier.

Despite having voted for the death of his cousin Louis XVI of France, and having denounced his son's defection, Philippe Égalité was guillotined on 6 November 1793.

Nearly executed before the fall of Robespierre, in July 1794 at the end of the Reign of Terror, she was transferred to the "Pension Belhomme", a former mental institution turned into a "prison for the rich" during the Revolution.

Rouzet accompanied them to the Spanish border and managed to secretly join them in Barcelona where he became her chancellor, and she obtained for him the title of comte de Folmont.

The couple had six children: On the eve of the French Revolution, in 1789, she was painted by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, the favourite portrait painter of Queen Marie Antoinette.

Below the breast is a Wedgwood medallion which Colin Eisler has identified as Poor Maria, possibly a reference to the life of the duchess, which was later destroyed because of the Revolution.