With the fall of Gaeta and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Maria Sophie and her husband went into exile in
Rome, the capital of what for 1,000 years had been the sizeable
Papal States, a large piece of central Italy but which, by 1860, had been reduced to the city of Rome, itself, as the armies of Victor Emanuel II came down from the north to join up with Garibaldi, the conqueror of the south. King Francis set up a government in exile in Rome that enjoyed diplomatic recognition by most European states for a few years as still the legitimate government of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Her wealth and privilege were, to a certain extent, overshadowed by personal tragedies. Her marriage was not consummated for many years, as her husband suffered from
phimosis. While in exile in Rome, rumours were spreading that the ex-queen had become pregnant with an illegitimate child and that - in order to avoid a public scandal - she gave health reasons to urgently visit her parents' house in
Possenhofen; furthermore, it was decided, in a family council, that Maria Sophia should retire to the
Ursuline Convent in
Augsburg, where on 24 November, 1862, she gave birth to a daughter. The daughter, who was named Mathilde Marie Sophie Henriette Elisabeth Louise, was immediately given to foster parents, the Count and Countess de Gineste, who raised her at the in
Tarn. Maria Sophie was said to be able to keep in touch with her daughter until she died, in January 1886, and that the queen even attended her funeral in Paris.
Countess Marie Larisch von Moennich, niece of Maria Sophie, had spread the story that the child's father was a Belgian officer of the papal guard named Count Armand de Lavaÿss. Although Countess Larisch's biographer Brigitte Sokop refuted this assertion and speculated that a possible father of the child would be the Spanish diplomat Salvador Bermúdez de Castro (later Duke of Ripalda and Santa Lucía), who was often to be seen in the company of the Neapolitan royal couple and who was also said to have had an affair (and also an illegitimate daughter) with Maria Sophie's sister
Mathilde, Countess of Trani, a great-great-grandniece of the Ginestes, Lorraine Kaltenbach, took up this issue in a book published in 2021, but without providing any conclusive evidence for her sometimes bold claims. Lorraine Kaltenbach affirmed that the father of Maria Sophie's illegitimate daughter was a relative of hers, a nobleman called Félix-Emmanuel de Lavaÿsse, serving as a pontifical
zouave, who officially recognized Daisy as his daughter on 16 May 1867 shortly before his death on 18 April 1868, aged 32. Kaltenbach relies mainly on oral statements from a deceased relative, which can no longer be verified, and cleverly constructs a plausible but speculative story that, despite numerous footnotes, she cannot substantiate with historical documents. The only historical evidence that can be verified is Marie's lung disease, as historian
Astrid Mathyshek detailed in her biography published in 2025. According to this biography, although there was a German-French woman who had a friendly relationship with Marie Larisch, Queen Maria Sophie's niece, there is no evidence that the young woman had any kind of family relationship with Queen Maria Sophie or ever came into contact with her. Afterwards, the relationship between the royal couple improved for a time. Francis submitted to an operation which allowed him to consummate the marriage, and Maria Sophie became pregnant. The couple was overjoyed at the turn of events and full of hope. On 24 December 1869, after ten years of marriage, Maria Sophie gave birth to a daughter, Maria Cristina Pia, who was born on the birthday of her aunt, Empress Elisabeth, who became her godmother. Unfortunately, the baby lived only three months and died on 28 March 1870. Maria Sophie and her husband never had another child. == Later life ==