The Kings' Mistresses (11 page)

It was not difficult, for either Marie or her husband, to see themselves in the grand characters from history and legend who were familiar to the baroque stage. The theaters of Italy and France in the seventeenth century did not produce plays about the real world around them. Instead, spectators were treated to dramatic enactments of familiar stories from myth and history that sought to strike their audiences with wonder, admiration, sadness, and joy. In Marie's day the staging of an opera often would include marvelous and complex machines to enable actors to fly across the stage or rise to the rafters, special effects to simulate cataclysmic events such as earthquake or fire, and elaborate sets evoking exotic and imaginary locales.

In Rome as in Venice, the carnival season gave rise to numerous masquerades and public parades, with noble families competing to
produce the most luxurious and imaginative float, and with members of these families participating in costume. After 1667, when the new pope lifted restrictions on carnival masquerade, Marie and Lorenzo stopped spending their winters in Venice and instead focused on the cultural entertainments being generated in Rome. When Rome seemed to offer little of interest to travelers from France seeking the sort of artistic and social entertainments they could find in Paris, the Colonna couple hosted balls, gambling parties, concerts, and generally open-ended visiting hours. “Without this house foreigners and especially Frenchmen would have difficulty passing the time,” wrote one traveler. One could enter and exit “when one wants; there one dances, gambles, has conversation and passes the evening very nicely.”
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In 1664 the Colonnas began renovating their palace to install a theater. The work continued even during their long absences in Venice, and productions started in 1666. By 1668 the theater was staging large-scale affairs with more than thirty actors and dancers. The Colonnas employed their own impresario, the playwright and director Filippo Accaioli, who also tutored their sons. Beginning in 1668, the dramatic productions alternated with parades during carnival. The floats Marie designed created a huge sensation. In 1665, after the birth of their second child, Lorenzo had designed a float on which he and Marie's brother had stood dressed as the twin celestial gods Castor and Pollux. The float in which Marie was featured for the 1668 carnival took the planetary metaphor to a more elaborate level. Constructed in the shape of a giant cloud rising some thirty feet into the air, drawn by four horses and escorted by a dozen more, along with numerous foot soldiers bedecked with feathers and Roman armor, the float was topped by a man dressed as Saturn, and below him appeared the figures of Mars and Jupiter. In the central position was Apollo as the sun, and to his left just below him were Venus, Diana, and Juno. Marie was Venus and her
close friend and lady-in-waiting, Countess Ortensia Stella, was Diana. Spectators could not have failed to recall that the sun-god figure was the favorite emblem and masquerade of Louis XIV, and they certainly were astonished by the daring of these noblewomen, whose participation in the Roman carnival parade was “a completely new thing, never seen before.”
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For a woman to appear masked in public was a violation of a long-standing ban in the holy city. Marie's planetary carnival machine engaged more than one prominent aristocrat in violating that ban, a collective rebellion of noblewomen that had the effect of doing away with the restriction for good.

For the 1669 carnival season Marie undertook projects that were even more provocative. She was tired of the constant criticism of her French-style “liberty” and her refusal to conform to Roman norms that kept women and men from socializing openly together. By this time her sister Hortense, the Duchess Mazarin, had joined Marie in Rome and they both took pleasure in challenging the city's conservative customs. It was in this spirit, and to assert her innocence and fortitude, that Marie decided to disguise herself as the warrior maiden Clorinda from her favorite work, Tasso's
Gerusalemme liberata
. “Thus,” she wrote,

The madrigal playfully yet boldly asserted four identities—warrior, maid, faithful wife, courtesan—for the disguised Marie. And why would Marie think that such flaunting of her liberty would silence those who criticized her for it? Marie embraced the “warrior lover” identity that Clorinda represented: Clorinda, the foreign princess knight who was beloved of her enemy, Prince Tancredi, and whom Tancredi would tragically and unknowingly kill in a nighttime battle. Describing her own personality, Marie would later write that she “loved vivacity and novelty, and talk of arms and soldierly subjects, rather than a peaceful place and a pacific government.”
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Her choice of theatrical disguises certainly helped keep this combative spirit alive. Lorenzo at first went along with even the most outrageous of Marie's masquerade schemes. He had his own reasons for encouraging the curiosity of Roman onlookers, even for offering fodder to the scandal-hungry gazettes. His approach to publicity was decidedly modern—whether the media coverage was positive or negative, Prince Colonna seemed to think that being in the public eye was almost always good. Enhancing his public profile by sponsoring spectacles that were both magnificent and titillating became a project he embraced, and one he viewed as comparable to the strategic use of spectacle that his “cousin” Louis XIV was famously achieving at his new palace of Versailles.

During the 1669 carnival season, the lively competition between Marie and the expatriate Queen Christina of Sweden was played out in masquerades the two women sponsored as part of an equestrian tournament held on the Piazza di San Marco. Six cavaliers, including Lorenzo Colonna and Philippe Mancini, competed to catch a ring on the point of their lances and strike a dark-skinned figure symbolizing the Saracens, ancient adversaries of the Crusaders.
Queen Christina presided over the event, watching from her box overlooking the piazza, surrounded by twenty-four cardinals. Marie's contribution to the spectacle was daring and provocative: in keeping with the theme of the Crusades, but drawing on the more fanciful legendary characters from her favorite work of literature by Tasso, Marie entered the parade on horseback, dressed as Armida, the sorceress who seduces the crusading hero Rinaldo, and followed by twenty-four cavaliers dressed as Turks. “It was hard to tell,” wrote one amused and bedazzled chronicler, “which of the two had a more impressive following, Princess Maria Mancini with 24 Turks or Queen Christina with 24 Cardinals.”
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If anyone doubted Prince Colonna's approval of his wife's designs for carnival, the final masquerade in which he and Marie collaborated for the 1669 festivities laid those doubts to rest. It was unlike anything seen before. Seated on top of a huge rolling cage filled with animals, Marie presided, dressed as the sorceress Circe from Homer's
Odyssey,
who had famously transformed Ulysses's men into beasts. Lorenzo, masked as Ulysses, was among the gentlemen seated at her feet, holding dogs on leashes to represent the lovers Circe had transformed into animals. Drawings by the artist Pierre Perrin documenting the occasion illustrated Marie's elaborate use of costumes, animals, and human actors. Circe, everyone knew, ultimately would be vanquished by the clever Ulysses, but his encounter with her was a familiar parable of male power vanquished by female seduction. Resplendent in her crown and holding a golden scepter on that February day in 1669, Marie was triumphant.

The association of Marie Mancini with legendary enchantresses had begun with her liaison with Louis XIV ten years earlier. In choosing to represent Armida, Marie may have been remembering the whispers of those in France who thought she had “bewitched” the king. Anne of Austria's lady-in-waiting Madame de Motteville had described Marie as Armida, and young Louis as the enchanted
Rinaldo, who had to be brought to his senses. As a young bride in Rome, Marie was compared in less ambiguous terms to the goddess of love, and her residence to the palace of Armida. At the palazzo Colonna, the art collections being amassed by Lorenzo and his wife included a painting depicting the legendary judgment of Paris, commissioned from the landscape artist Gaspard Dughet. Lorenzo posed as Paris, gazing in pride and adoration at the lovely Marie, who was Venus. Sometime in the year following the 1669 cavalcade, the Colonnas commissioned another painting of Marie by the portraitist Voet. This one, however, was much larger in scale and was a full-body portrait of the subject, dressed as an oriental queen in exotic furs and jewels. Everyone thought it was Armida.

But the lavish celebrations at the palazzo Colonna and the public displays by a couple who collaborated in their patronage of the arts could not disguise the fact that their marriage was disintegrating. Foreign correspondents operating in Rome for the European gazettes sent reports of the breakdown in relations between the constable and his wife.
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Marie began to spend more time in retreat in her library, poring over her collection of books on astrology. Predicting the future based on the alignment of the stars and planets had always fascinated her, and she had considerable expertise in the practice. During a difficult series of months in 1670, she wrote and published an astrological almanac. During the same period she felt her health declining, and by the late winter of 1671 she was seriously ill.

Lorenzo was indifferent to her health. Even when she was crying out in pain for several nights, convulsed with stomach cramps, he exhibited no emotion. Though she recovered from this particular crisis, his indifference left her with dark suspicions that she could barely bring herself to share with those close to her. The Roman gazettes, though, did not hesitate to insinuate that Marie Colonna's ailments might have been caused by poison. And some of Marie's closest associates, including her longtime maidservant Morena,
brought her “evidence” of what they thought was a plot, hatched by Lorenzo, to do away with his wife. An anonymous letter addressed to the constable was intercepted and shown to Marie. In it the writer assured Colonna that his wife's malady was incurable and urged him to find a new wife without delay.
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Meanwhile, as her estrangement from Lorenzo grew more marked, Marie had been able to renew her intimacy with Hortense as she watched her younger sister embark on what would be a long and adventurous life as a fugitive from her husband.

—Charles II of England to his sister the Duchess of Orleans, June 1668

 

 

 

 

O
N THE NIGHT OF JUNE 13, 1668, Hortense ran away from her husband, leaving her four young children behind. Philippe provided a carriage but remained behind to deflect suspicion for as long as possible. Hortense was accompanied by Philippe's manservant, Narcisse, and her own maidservant, Nanon. Both women were disguised in men's clothing. The group escaped Paris by the closest city gate, the Porte Saint-Antoine, next to the Bastille. At the gate the duchess was met by the Chevalier de Rohan, who had volunteered his squire Courbeville to join Narcisse as an escort. She had decided to take an eastern route rather than the southern one, which would have been a more obvious choice for a flight toward Italy but would have required her to pass through more of the city of Paris and to traverse the Left Bank to leave by the Porte Saint-Victor. So she and her little party left just before midnight in a six-horse coach. Her flight would be only the first in
a long series of trips across Europe in search of a court to provide her with protection.

It was a momentous decision, but not one that she had made impulsively. Philippe and the Chevalier de Rohan had worked closely with her in the preceding weeks to ensure her safe and fast transport out of the city and toward the eastern frontier of France, where she would be sheltered by the Duke of Lorraine as she waited to leave the country. In the many voyages her husband had forced her to take with him during their marriage, Hortense would have noticed that new roads were being cut and old ones improved as the state-run postal service expanded. Travelers to France frequently remarked on the good quality of the roads, which often were paved in stone, compared with the bumpy dirt roads of their homelands. Postal relay stations also provided some reliability for travelers. Fresh horses could be rented for private coaches, or passengers could ride in the mail-carrying stagecoaches that followed regular schedules.

But long-distance travel was still slow, uncomfortable, and risky. One of Philippe's squires had been sent ahead to confirm where the carriage transporting the runaways could stop to find quick changes of horses. In the month leading up to the planned escape, Hortense was so nervous that she became sick and unable to eat, causing her sister Olympe some concern, but the secret was carefully kept from her. Philippe and Hortense did not trust their sister; although she supported Hortense in her legal battle with the duke, she would never recommend such a risky move. Olympe was a seasoned courtier, adept at intrigue, but always wanting a clear picture of the likely outcome of her actions. Hortense was hurling herself into a void, with uncertain consequences.