As their trial date drew near, the d'Hautevilles faced their most critical and most public legal experience. They knew that the trial would determine which of them got custody of Frederick. What they did not know was that it would become a major legal event with uncertain consequences for clients and counsel as well as the issues over which they battled. Most custody hearings lasted a day or two, but postponements and courtroom maneuvers would stretch theirs late into the fall. During those weeks and months, Ellen and Gonzalve learned yet another legal lesson: A trial was not a simple process of dispute resolution, but a complicated social drama.

Tribunals like the Philadelphia Court of General Sessions have long been popular public theaters. A seventeenth-century English diarist eagerly anticipated an upcoming trip to London, when he would indulge in three of his favorite pleasures: “good food and drink, the society of pretty women, and entertaining mornings in the law courts, watching the cases there.” The courts were equally attractive to nineteenth-century Americans. Located in the center of every city and many towns, courthouses staged a constant repertoire of social dramas like the d'Hauteville case. And these performances ought to be understood in the anthropological meaning of social dramas: events that reveal latent conflicts in a society and thus illuminate its fundamental social structures. Such events turned the courtroom into a public theater and trials into morality plays that forced the litigants and the public to confront some of their most cherished hopes and crippling fears.