When a woman you have never met gets a court to make your father adopt her, and then comes to tea

When a woman you have never met gets a court to make your father adopt her, and then comes to tea. This photograph captures, quite literally, the first meeting of King Philippe of Belgium with his sister, Princess Delphine of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the illegitimate daughter of King Albert II of Belgium. Only recently, on 5 October, after seven years of legal proceedings, she secured recognition of her paternity by the aged Albert and her right to style herself a princess. It is sad that from 2001 there was no relationship between father and daughter, precisely the time when she was trying to assert her rights, although the king had appeared in her life before that, which, together with the DNA test, became one of the arguments in a court that for a decade declined to hear the case. In the end Delphine received a surname, her children the right to be called princes and princesses, and she will have a compulsory share in her father's estate when he is gone. She has no intention of claiming an allowance from the crown, just as she will not be representing the Belgian royal family.