The Kings' Mistresses (4 page)

All of Mazarin's relatives were encouraged to spend time in the salons of the Louvre and the adjacent private residences, where they were introduced to a life filled with conversation, concerts, dances, and theater. The Mancini children joined their brother Alphonse and sister Olympe, who had been brought to Paris a year earlier. If any of Mazarin's nieces or nephews had aspired to solitude and shelter from the public view, their arrival in Paris put an abrupt end to such inclinations. There was no time, and no place, to be alone.

Nonetheless, the cardinal was concerned that Marie and her younger sister Hortense were not quite prepared for this new and intense social milieu. He observed that fourteen-year-old Marie was particularly awkward, as she later would recall: “The fatigue of the road, a continual agitation brought on by my cheerful and high-strung nature, and my poor eating habits—I ate as readily the foods that disagreed with me as those that might do me good—had reduced me to a pitiful state; for that reason Monsieur le Cardinal resolved to put me in a convent, to see, as he said, if it would fatten me up a bit.”
³
And so she and little Hortense spent eighteen months in the Convent of the Visitation in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques, where they received a more liberal instruction than what had been prescribed for them in Rome. They studied from a curriculum in French, literature, religion, and the arts that had made the Visitandine nuns the favorite teachers of young girls of elite society. When they were finally deemed ready to join the young king and his court at the end of 1656, seventeen-year-old Marie was prepared for new friendships and more freedom.

Her mother and uncle were busy trying to ensure Marie's future by planning a good marriage, but she resisted their interference and soon drew the anger of her mother, who insisted on keeping a close watch to limit her from joining the youthful company at court. Madame Mancini enlisted her brother, Cardinal Mazarin, in dominating her rebellious daughter, as Marie would remember: “After my mother's complaints, my uncle reprimanded me in such acid tones and such cutting terms that any other girl than I would have been sick with remorse, but since I did not take things to heart at all, everything he said to me made a clear impression on my memory and made none at all on my spirit.”
⁴

One reason Hieronyma Mancini could not control her daughters was her own health. Throughout the summer and fall of 1656, she had struggled with a fever. She became consumed with anxiety and fear over her illness, which inexplicably came and went. Overshadowing all attempts to find a cure for her sickness was the knowledge that years before, her husband had predicted that she would die in this, her forty-second year. In October the fever seemed to have gone. But by December Hieronyma lay dying on a bed in her brother's apartment at the Louvre palace. The king's doctors had been summoned but could not reverse the course of her illness. There was nothing left to do but encourage her to receive, as comfortably as possible, the final visits of her family and friends. The king came to pay his respects, as did Cardinal Mazarin, though he would never stay long enough to answer his sister's pressing questions about precisely how he intended to care for her children. Hieronyma knew that her charming young Hortense would inevitably find a good match, but she urged the cardinal to consider consigning her troublesome Marie to a convent life instead of marriage. Mazarin was reluctant, and Marie remained adamantly opposed to any such notion. Marie became so angry with her mother and so unable to exhibit the humility demanded of her that her mother
excluded her from her sickroom. When Hieronyma died on December 29, 1656, Marie could feel no grief.

After her mother's death, Marie joined Hortense under the care of Madame de Venelle, a governess appointed by their uncle, who loosened his grip on the daily occupations of his nieces and encouraged their growing acquaintance with the king. At eighteen, Louis was undergoing the finishing touches of a long and careful education to prepare him to officially assume the throne. He was starting to feel irritated by the attentions of his mother and the watchful eye of her prime minister. As he prepared for his first military campaigns, he was trying to form his own opinions about the ever-present intrigues that were the hub of life at court. By the end of 1657, plans for the young king to lead an army into battle against the Spanish in Flanders were completed, and Louis departed amid much fanfare. For the public, his service in battle would be a final requirement before he could officially accede to the throne.

Though he passed this test of his virility and readiness to rule, he returned to court from the battlefield in early 1658 suffering from an illness that quickly spread alarm. The journal of the king's health kept by his physician, Antoine Vallot, details the seriousness of the sickness, describing high fever, difficulty breathing, and skin that was swollen and discolored. Amid the frantic medical consultations, preparations were made to administer last rites. Courtiers held vigil outside the royal chambers and jockeyed for favor, trying to secure protection from powerful patrons in anticipation of the young monarch's death. When suddenly the illness began to dissipate, the printed
Gazette
and the pamphleteers eagerly spread the news across the country.

At court, no one exhibited more relief at the king's convalescence than Marie Mancini. During her mother's illness just one year earlier, she had found it difficult to express grief or concern, but those who knew and watched her during the king's malaise were struck
by her distress and genuine sadness. While other courtiers had been caught up by the intrigues and speculation about the political consequences of the king's death, Marie's anxiety seemed to be focused solely on his person. It was a display of affection that made a deep impression on Louis. By the summer of 1658, everyone was saying that the two young people were in love.

Now the court was treated to the spectacle of an ever-so-healthy and virile king, who missed no opportunity to escape with his young love to the gardens of the Louvre and Fontainebleau, where Marie would read to him from her favorite Italian romances. To some it even seemed as though the two were acting out roles from the popular romance epic
Gerusalemme Liberata,
in which the young warrior hero Rinaldo is seduced by the enchantress Armida. Both Louis and Marie had been trained in dance, an art and skill that was obligatory at court and considered central to a worldly education, and they both performed in the court ballets that were commissioned by some of the best musicians and poets of the realm. Marie encouraged the serious attention the king gave to his personal performances, fostering his relationship with the young Italian composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, who was quickly rising to prominence and fame in France for his works of ballet and opera. The popular playwright Molière wrote verses for one of these, the opera-ballet
Alicidiane,
in which Marie danced. The king's cousin Mademoiselle de Montpensier described this cultural education that Marie seemed to be giving the king:

Cardinal Mazarin and Queen Anne were happy enough to encourage Marie's contribution to the cultural education of the young king, but they were caught off-guard by the intensity of the romance. Plans were under way to find a suitable wife for Louis, and even the fiercely ambitious Mazarin could hardly expect to place one of his own family of Italian merchants on the French throne. But this did not prevent public speculation that such a goal was precisely what Mazarin had in mind in bringing his nieces to France in the first place. Madame de Motteville, one of Queen Anne's ladies-in-waiting, reported that Mazarin even tested out the idea of a marriage between Marie and Louis in a conversation with the queen in which he pretended to think the scenario was preposterous:

In any event, Mazarin never publicly showed any inclination to try to arrange a royal marriage for his niece. But the task of arranging a strong marriage for Louis that would expand France's power in Europe was one that he felt was absolutely his ministerial responsibility, especially because his health had started to fail him. The matter was pressing. Two prominent candidates were under consideration:
Princess Marguerite of Savoy and the Spanish Princess Marie-Thérèse, niece of Queen Anne. The king himself, however, seemed to pay little heed to this strategizing. His attentions were for Marie alone. Even when Louis was sent to Lyon to formally meet Marguerite of Savoy in October 1658, Marie was with him, along with an entourage of one hundred carriages. The slow pace of the voyage offered many opportunities for intimate gatherings and festivities. In Lyon, Marie took part in the balls and lavish ceremonies organized in the king's honor and he continued to pay her court, to the embarrassment of his mother. Louis would escort Marie back to her residence in the Place Bellecour every evening, “first following her carriage, then acting as a coachman, and then finally getting inside.”
⁷

When he heard this, Mazarin abruptly recalled the party to Paris to pursue marriage discussions with the emissaries recently arrived from Spain. Later, in a letter to Louis XIV, Mazarin would say that he had recognized “since Lyon” the seriousness of the danger Marie posed to plans for a royal marriage.

Negotiations continued nonetheless, through the winter and into the spring of 1659. Though the king made no objection, he also continued to spend most of his time with Marie. “Upon our return to Paris,” Marie would later remember, “our sole concern was to amuse ourselves. There was not a single day, or rather a single moment, that was not devoted to pleasure, and I can say that never was time spent more enjoyably than it was by us.”
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Louis seemed eager to assure her that he had no care for his more serious obligations and that he was willing to throw off the weight of his identity as prince and defender of France just to please his young love. Standing out in Marie's memory many years later was one of the more sentimental demonstrations of “how delicately and gallantly the king courted,” when he threw away his sword after it had accidentally bruised her as they were walking side by side in the woods
of Bois-le-Vicomte.
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Queen Anne observed these displays with increasing concern. She was not amused when the visiting queen of Sweden, seated at a banquet next to Louis and Marie, openly challenged the young king to defy convention and “marry for someone you love.”
¹⁰
Queen Anne was even more displeased when Louis made no effort to hide his passion during the diplomatic visits of envoys from the Spanish court. A royal marriage of Louis with the Spanish princess was already a theoretical possibility discussed in diplomatic circles, yet Louis seemed to pay it no heed. Instead he flaunted his growing independence from his mother and the cardinal, refusing to observe the austerity measures she had ordered for the Lenten season and continuing to spend all of his time with Marie in the gardens of the Louvre and on long equestrian outings in the Fontainebleau forest.

It was Queen Anne who decided that the couple had to separate. First she engaged the services of a governess who was instructed to spy on Marie and follow the couple everywhere she could. But soon she decided that the only effective strategy would be to make Louis see for himself that the separation was both necessary and inevitable. Anne's animosity toward Marie was so strong that she had begun to truly see her as an evil enchantress, like the magical Armida in Marie's favorite romance. The queen mother “told the Cardinal, who was preparing to leave, what she felt. She made him see her wish to separate the king her son from one who kept him bound in chains which she thought shameful: she wished to show to the king the mirror that was presented to Rinaldo, not only to draw him from the spell of Armida, but to force him to fly from so fatal a prison.”
¹¹

By the summer of 1659, Mazarin was also scheming to find a way to separate the love-struck couple. A marriage between Louis and Marie-Thérèse of Spain, Mazarin's preferred outcome, would be in effect a treaty between the two countries, and would mark a definitive
end to the remnants of French armed resistance to the cardinal that had begun during the Fronde years. The last rebellious French noble army that, supported by the Spanish, had continued its attacks on Mazarin's forces through the 1650s, was defeated at the battle of Dunkirk in June 1658. It was time to seal the peace. After signing an initial preliminary agreement in Paris, Mazarin made plans for a ceremonial meeting with the Spanish emissaries at the border town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz to design a formal treaty and marriage contract.

On June 22, 1659, Louis XIV and Marie Mancini were forced to separate. Marie was ordered to accompany her uncle in the train of carriages heading south toward Spain. At the last minute she was permitted the company of her two younger sisters, Hortense and ten-year-old Marianne, the youngest of the eight Mancini children and the last to join the family in Paris. Mazarin said he would escort his nieces along with their governess to La Rochelle, a city under his personal governorship. The night before the planned departure, the king had met privately, and at length, with both the cardinal and Queen Anne, in interviews during which he had begged, reportedly falling to his knees, to be allowed to marry the cardinal's niece. But the following morning he could accompany Marie only as far as her coach to offer a tearful farewell. The moment was public, and striking to all who saw and heard about it, and the scene would be endlessly replayed in different cultural venues, in politics, and in spectacle. The young king's tearful goodbye as Marie reluctantly boarded the carriage became an emblem in the popular imagination of his coming of age, and a sad acknowledgment of the loss of humanity that necessarily accompanies the assumption of power. It was at this moment, it was thought, that Louis presented Marie with a magnificent strand of pearls she had admired when the queen of England had come to the French court a few months earlier, and which he had since bought. The leave-taking would be, according to legend, the last time the king shed tears. Marie's parting words
to him, “Sire, I am leaving and you weep, and yet you are king,” would reappear in opera, poetry, and theater for generations to come.