French-born member of the former House of Orléans-Braganza and the former Brazilian Imperial Family.
With the premature death of her father, Prince Luís of Orléans-Braganza, in 1920, and the following year, the death of her grandmother, Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil, in 1921, Pia Maria’s older brother Prince Pedro Henrique of Orléans-Braganza claimed the title Prince Imperial of Brazil in 1920, and the position of head of the Imperial House of Brazil in 1921. At the time of the latter claim, Prince Pedro Henrique still had no children, so Prince Luiz Gastão of Orléans-Braganza, brother of Pedro Henrique and Pia Maria, claimed the title of Prince Imperial. Prince Luiz Gastão died early ten years later, at the age of twenty, in 1931, giving Pia Maria, for the brief period of seven years, a claim to be Princess Imperial of Brazil and the second in the line of succession to the former Brazilian throne.
This situation changed in 1938, when the first-born of Pedro Henrique, Prince Luiz of Orléans-Braganza was born. Pia Maria returned to using an earlier title of Princess of Brazil, the third in line of succession, a situation that she would retain even through unequal marriage, with the Count of Nicolay. The “provisional” situation of Princess Imperial to which Pia Maria was subjected is similar to that of her great-great-aunt Princess Januária of Brazil, who was the Princess Imperial from 1835 to 1845, when the firstborn of the Emperor Pedro II was born.
She married in Paris, on 12 August 1948, René Jean Marie Nicholas de Nicolay, Count of Nicolay (1910-1954), son of Aymard Marie Jean de Nicolay, Marquis of Goussainville, and his wife, the Marquise Yvonne Léonie Marie Anne Georgine. They had two children. She died at the Chateau de Le Lude in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 24 October 2000 at age 87.
Link to Wikipedia biography