climate between the Imperial couple were lies, Dom Pedro I decided to hold a large farewell reception where he demanded that both the Empress and his mistress the Marchioness of Santos appear together with him before the ecclesiastical and diplomatic dignitaries for the protocolary hand-kissing. With the fulfillment of this demand, Maria Leopoldina would have officially recognized her husband's mistress, and for this she defied Dom Pedro I's orders and refused to appear at the reception. The Emperor, known to have a volatile genius, had a bitter argument with his wife, and even tried to drag her around the palace, attacking her with words and kicks. At the end, he attended the hand-kissing ceremony accompanied only by the Marchioness of Santos and departed to the war with no resolution to the situation. There is no other witness of the aggression other than the three, and that the suspicions about the aggressions suffered were raised by the ladies and doctors who supported Maria Leopoldina afterwards. The reality of the facts was perhaps different: The Empress, who had been in severe depression for months and in the 12th week of pregnancy, had a profoundly damaged health. Reportedly, she send a last letter to her sister Marie Louise, dictated to the Marchioness of Aguiar, in which she mentions the terrible attack she had suffered at the hands of her husband in the presence of his mistress; however, recent studies show that this last letter from Maria Leopoldina can be a fraud. The original, in French, was never found in any file, in Brazil or abroad. The copy in the Historical Archives of the Imperial Museum in Petrópolis, is written in Portuguese, with a single sentence in French saying that the transcription was made according to an original issued on 12 December 1826. This copy, used by all scholars until then, only appeared in Rio de Janeiro on 5 August 1834 (almost eight years after the Empress's death) to be registered with the notary Joaquim José de Castro. They served as witnesses to certify the origin of the letter César Cadolino, J. M. Flach, J. Buvelot and Carlos Heindricks. Of these, evidently two, Cadolino and Flach, were greatly indebted to Maria Leopoldina and for them was nothing better than to have a "confession" made by the Empress herself. Reactions During Maria Leopoldina's agony, the most diverse rumors arose: that the Empress was a prisoner