While the d'Hauteville case entered American legal culture as a precedent of legal experience, it remained as it had begun, an individual legal experience for its principal characters. The case had been a defining moment for each of them. For the rest of their lives, Ellen and Gonzalve felt its effects. They continued to perform the roles scripted for them in the Philadelphia Court of General Sessions. Gonzalve became the patriarch he had so desperately wanted to be by creating a new life and new family at Hauteville. Ellen fulfilled the role of responsible mother that she and her lawyers had created in the Philadelphia courtroom. And their fight for Frederick continued as well.

In 1858 Ellen and Frederick sailed for Europe and one last struggle with Gonzalve. It would be, though, a clash of hearts not law. Unlike a previous visit when they slipped in and out of the continent without telling Gonzalve, Ellen notified her former husband of their voyage. He immediately invited Frederick to Hauteville. Gonzalve staged a lavish welcome for the boy. Peasants showered him with flowers and pulled his carriage up the hill to the chateau. Down in the village of Vevey, Ellen worried that her son would resent her for what he had lost, and feared losing him to Hauteville's splendor. Watching the unfolding drama, Ellen's sister Anna reported to her husband back in Boston, “Mr. d'Hauteville is evidently doing his utmost to please [Frederick], and the boy would be more than mortal not to be dazzled.