Ah, Genevieve, you took the words right out of my mouth. Well said.
Anyway, over on the Glittering Royal Events board, there was a poster who said something very striking about the whole situation, and as such I would like to paraphrase her here [her name is Lindy]:
In response to someone saying that the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess seemed happy about what had happened, she replied that she really did not feel that Henri and MT were overjoyed with the situation. She goes on to say that she wondered about what had been going on with the LRF for the past few months- there were no photos of the family during their annual summer holiday in France, and Henri attended several reasonably big events without MT [Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia's birthday, Prince Antoine de Ligne's funeral [who by the way was Henri's uncle]] and that neither of them went to the wedding of Henri's cousin's daughter Princess Elisabeth de Ligne, and etc. And she's right and I didn't realize it until she pointed it out- for them to be missing from these events is really quite unusual. Do you think that this possibly could have been because of turmoil in the household? Not entirely unfeasible, right?
I do believe that Henri and MT are pretty conservative, MT more than Henri- she was born and raised in a pretty strict Catholic household [again, I'm paraphrasing the original poster]. You can't imagine that having their 19 year old son, who is unmarried and for that fact doesn't really seem to be doing anything with his life as of yet [ie, no college, please don't jump down my throat as it is just my observation!] coming up to them and saying "Oh, yeah, Mom and Dad, my girlfriend is pregnant with my child" and them doing double backflips with excitement, can you?
Plus, her pregnancy was announced in around her third month [due March 2006- so she became pregnant very roughly in June 2005]- I think that they probably decided to head off any potential and gossipy damage by announcing she was pregnant before she started to show. Better to control the fire than add the fuel, as they say.
This really isn't anything new to this family- look at Prince Jean, Henri's brother, and his [ex?] wife Helene Vestur- their first daughter was born before they ever got married. And it's a well-known fact, but nobody says anything about it. Wierd. I wonder if Louis will have to give up his right to the throne, like his uncle Jean did?
I hope it all works out. I do so love this family!