The Kings' Mistresses (5 page)

Marie described the parting, and the loneliness that followed, as the most painful period of her life: “I cannot conceal the pain that this separation caused me; nothing has hurt me so deeply in my life. All possible suffering seemed to me as nothing in comparison with this absence. There was not a moment when I did not wish for death, as the only cure for my ills. In short, I was in a state that cannot possibly be expressed either by what I have just said or by any stronger terms.”
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The cardinal accompanied his niece's carriage as far as Poitiers, then sent her party ahead to La Rochelle while he continued south to devote himself fully to the discussions with the Spanish. In La Rochelle the three girls and their governess, Madame de Venelle, were greeted royally and treated to fireworks, theater, and coastal promenades for several weeks. At first Marie tried to let herself be drawn into the diversions, even organizing a costumed marionette production of Molière's new play,
Les precieuses ridicules,
for her local hosts. But her outings to the city's coastal environs became more frequent, as did her conversations with a recently appointed quartermaster from Paris, a cousin of Mazarin's financial minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Against the specific orders of the cardinal, who had forbidden private correspondence between his niece and the king, the young Colbert de Terron was smuggling a steady stream of secret letters between Louis and Marie. Toward the end of July Marie voluntarily moved from her comfortable quarters in La Rochelle to the austere fortress of nearby Brouage, overlooking the rocky coastline and the Atlantic Ocean, where she devoted herself fully to her solitude, her melancholy, and her correspondence with her lost love.

From his negotiating outpost in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Mazarin demanded regular reports on the behavior of Louis and Marie. He
had a valuable ally in Madame de Venelle, who wrote letters advising him to examine all the mail packets leaving La Rochelle from any of the three girls, as Marie was likely to disguise her letters among those of her sisters. She informed him that Marie was spending long hours in the company of an astrologer from La Rochelle, poring over the celestial indicators of her fate. Madame de Venelle scrutinized the couriers who came and went from her traveling party from the moment they approached La Rochelle. “I'm looking for a secure envoy,” she wrote Mazarin, “so that I can write your Eminence to tell you that things seem a bit worse than you feared, and it would serve your Eminence's interests to have the first packets mailed from La Rochelle examined.”
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Marie later remembered that after their separation the king withdrew to his hunting lodge at Chantilly, “where he did nothing but send couriers to me, the first of whom was a musketeer bearing letters of five pages each.”
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When Mazarin learned of the extent of this continuing contact, he sent blistering reprimands to Jean-Baptiste Colbert for failing to interrupt it. Colbert was doubly mortified by the betrayal of his cousin, who had been instrumental in helping Marie get letters out of Brouage, and he offered Mazarin his resignation. The cardinal turned his attentions to Louis, writing long letters from Saint-Jean-de-Luz imploring the young man to consider the risk he was posing to the state and to his own well-being as king of France, soon to be united through marriage to the Spanish throne. He tried every possible argument, including pleas for the king to have pity on his own vulnerable position. “Pray consider in what condition I am,” Mazarin wrote, “and whether there be in the world a man more wretched than myself, who, after applying himself continually with the greatest zeal to raise your reputation, and to procure by all ways the glory of your arms, the ease of your subjects, and the good of your state, has the displeasure to see a person who belongs to me on the very point of overturning all, and causing your ruin, if you go on to give way to your passion for her.”
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He also sharply attacked Marie's character and motives, declaring that the king was blinded to them:

Louis had even managed to smuggle gifts to his love, including a puppy that he arranged to have delivered in a basket, wearing an embroidered collar that read, “I belong to Marie.”

Mazarin insisted to Madame de Venelle that Marie be made to see reason. “I would like to know what Marie thinks,” he wrote, “and whether with all the flattery that those readers of horoscopes give her, she does not know that she has taken the road toward being the most unhappy woman of her century.”
¹⁷
Mazarin discussed the urgency of the situation in letters to the queen as well, even as he publicly behaved as though the Spanish wedding would certainly be concluded. Although the queen thought the king would go through with the ceremony, she and Mazarin both seemed to view his love as an illness that needed to be cured, a spell that needed to be broken, in order for the wedding to be blessed. In this view of passionate love they were perfectly in tune with the culture of the period. Passion was a destructive emotion, while a more controlled love based on tenderness and esteem was the only form of affection that noble souls were to strive for. Although Louis tried to present his liaison as one based on friendship and respectful of authority, his mother and the cardinal insisted that it was a dangerous sickness.

By the end of August Mazarin was on the verge of finalizing the marriage treaty, which included a delay of a few months, to spare the Spanish king the hardship of traveling through the Pyrenees in the winter for the planned ceremony. Both Queen Anne and her prime minister were glad of the postponement, which gave them more time to prepare Louis. In their letters they referred to Louis as “the Confident” and Marie as “the Person.” “I believe the Confident,” Mazarin informed Anne,

Eventually both Louis and Marie realized that their liaison could not last. For Louis, the recognition came as he read these relentless missives, along with the reports of Mazarin's superlative powers of political negotiation that were being transmitted to Paris from the party at Saint-Jean-de-Luz. The letters Louis penned have been lost, but we can discern them in the responses he received, and it is apparent that he gradually gave up arguing in favor of Marie and instead simply continued his secret correspondence with her. Madame de Venelle was trying to play an effective role as Mazarin's spy, but she only managed to enrage him with her reports of the
large packets being delivered regularly to Marie's room, where Marie refused to allow entry to anyone but her sister Hortense. What angered Mazarin even more was that, given the reported size of the bundles, it was clear that not only was Louis writing his own letters to Marie, but he was also sending her copies of the letters he had received from others, including Mazarin himself.

At the beginning of August 1659, the full court made a formal voyage to join the marriage negotiations in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and Louis somehow managed to persuade his mother to permit him to visit Marie en route. Mazarin was in Paris, and the queen had been unhappy with the miserable state to which her relations with her son had fallen since she had demanded that he end his affair with Marie. She blamed the cardinal for having allowed the liaison to flourish in the first place. Persuaded that the king would not break his promise to spend just one day in the company of Marie and her sisters, she indulged him. Madame de Venelle received a letter from Queen Anne summoning the girls to a rendezvous in the town of Saint-Jean-d'Angély, halfway between La Rochelle and the Spanish frontier. Despite frantic letters from Madame de Venelle asking for guidance, the cardinal found himself powerless to prevent the meeting. There, during a daylong series of private conversations, the king reaffirmed his feelings for Marie. The thirteen-year-old Hortense was witness to many of these interviews, and she would later recall that “nothing could equal the passion that the king showed and the tenderness with which he asked Marie's pardon for all that he had made her suffer because of him.”
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But sometime between this meeting and the king's return voyage from the Spanish border in October, Louis accepted his fate. Was his rendezvous with Marie a bargain struck with his mother, in exchange for a promise to go through with the planned marriage? Madame de Motteville wrote that after sacrificing Marie, the king seemed to become even closer to his mother. “The king and queen
were both deserving of praise for having on this occasion preserved their union uninjured, he bearing generously the hard effects of her perfect affection, and she feeling the hurt that she did with her own hand to the son she loved so dearly.”
²⁰
At Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the king gave his personal approval to the progress of the Spanish treaty negotiations and the impending marriage, which would take place the following summer.

After the king returned to Paris, Queen Anne encouraged him to appear in public with other young women. She made sure that reports of his activities and apparent gaiety were transmitted to Marie in Brouage. The cardinal's agents took an even more targeted approach, one that was sure to arouse Marie's jealousy and disappointment. They pressured Marie's older sister Olympe, who had remained at court and enjoyed a close relationship with the royal family, to cultivate an intimacy with Louis, bribing her with the offer of a lucrative position as lady-in-waiting to the future queen. “I have urged Madame the Countess to spend more time with the king and lavish more attention on him,” wrote Mazarin's informant Bartet. “The Queen will be even more pleased by this if news of it is sent to Brouage.”
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In Brouage, Marie read with dismay reports of the king's high spirits and his outings with her sister, some of which Olympe herself had written, with the queen's encouragement. Isolated and unable to investigate the rumors for herself, and fully aware that in any case she had lost Louis to the Spanish marriage, Marie did not take long to understand what her own role had to be. She wrote a pleading and submissive letter to her uncle. “I beseech you to grant me two requests: the first, to keep people from mocking me, and the second, to save me from their cruel laughter by arranging a marriage for me, quickly.”
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By September Mazarin was writing letters to Marie congratulating her on having come to her senses, and strongly assuring her that
he would reward her for her obedience: “You will not be the worse for this, because, continuing to conduct yourself in this manner, you will receive marks of my tenderness on all occasions relating to you and you will see, with satisfaction, that you have not only a good uncle in me, but also a father who loves you with all his heart.”
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Madame de Venelle sent reports that Marie was no longer responding to the king's letters, which were arriving with decreasing frequency. Marie had seen that she depended on her uncle's goodwill. Her letters to him expressed only submission:

Was Marie secretly holding on to the hope that the situation would reverse itself? She insisted on remaining at the fortress of Brouage, close to Bordeaux, rather than returning to Paris. Madame de Venelle noted in a letter to Mazarin that although Marie was obeying his orders to cease writing letters to Louis, she was nevertheless sending word to him, via messenger, that she could not respond only because she was obeying orders. “I think that Mademoiselle's intentions are good,” Venelle wrote, “but I fear that fire is smoldering under those ashes, and if the two were to see each other, I doubt that their generosity would last.”
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Mazarin did not let this worry him. He returned his attention to the details of the treaty with Spain, which in his declining state of health, he had come to view as his most important, and final, legacy. At her uncle's insistence, Marie left Brouage to return to Paris on December 30, 1659, but by this time Louis and most of the French court had moved to Provence to await the finalization of the treaty, which was ratified on January 23, 1660. Preparations for the marriage ceremony itself were initiated immediately, and Marie heard constant talk of them during the weeks and months that followed. The marriage of Louis XIV to Marie-Thérèse of Spain was finally celebrated on June 9, 1660, in the royal chapel of Fontarabie near Saint-Jean-de-Luz, on the Spanish border. The following day the kings of France and Spain knelt together and placed their hands on a Bible in a promise of peace and eternal friendship. It was a glorious moment for Mazarin, who personally orchestrated the ritual by giving signals from his seat on a balcony overlooking the ceremony, to indicate precisely when the two kings were to enter and leave the room together. Six days later the newlywed couple and their train of more than a hundred members of the French court left for the long trek back to Paris. The route took them near La Rochelle. There the king, suddenly instructing his wife and all but a few cavaliers to wait for him, made a solitary detour to the fortress of Brouage. He knew that he would not find Marie there, but it was where she had been living when they had last seen each other.