of Goiás with the style of Highness and the right to use the honorific "Dona". In a letter to her sister Marie Louise, the Empress says: “The seductive monster is the cause of all my misfortunes”. Solitary, isolated, devoted only to giving birth to an heir to the throne (the future Emperor Dom Pedro II would be born in 1825), Maria Leopoldina became increasingly depressed. Since the beginning of November 1826, the Empress' health rapidly waned: cramps, vomiting, bleeding and delusions were frequent in her last weeks of her life, worsened by a new pregnancy. Maria Leopoldina was loved by all the Brazilian people, and her popularity was even greater and more expressive than that of Dom Pedro. Rio de Janeiro began to monitor the severity of the Empress' disease. The ambassador of the Kingdom of Prussia, Theremim, related with respect the public demonstrations of love for the Empress to the court of Berlin: On 7 December 1826, the Diário Fluminense reported that the people of Rio de Janeiro continued, in their anxiety, to seek at all times to know the "afflictive state" of the Empress: On the afternoon of the previous day (6 December), as reported by the same newspaper (and later confirmed by Father Sampaio's sermon) several processions accompanying "the Sacred Images of the respective churches" were destined for the Imperial Chapel. According to Father Sampaio: Cause of death There are disagreements about the real cause of death of the first Empress of Brazil. For some authors, Maria Leopoldina would have died as a result of puerperal sepsis, while the Emperor was in Rio Grande do Sul, where he had inspected the troops during the Cisplatine War. The version that Maria Leopoldina died as a result of the attacks on her during a tantrum of her husband, is a widespread theory corroborated by historians such as Gabriac, Carl Seidler, John Armitage and Isabel Lustosa. The perception of real violence as the cause of death suffered a certain setback —even if a fatal assault did not necessarily reach the skeleton— with the recent exhumation of the Empress' remains where there was no bone fracture. This would have happened on 20 November 1826, when Maria Leopoldina would take over the regency so that the Emperor could travel to the South to deal with the war against Uruguay. Wanting to prove that the rumors about his extramarital relations and the bad