The Kings' Mistresses (6 page)

News of this sentimental pilgrimage alarmed Mazarin, who had turned his attentions to the need to quickly find a suitable husband for his niece. He had heard that Marie, in Paris, was receiving the attentions of the young Prince Charles de Lorraine, and Mazarin was inclined to consider him as a possible candidate, except that a French marriage meant that Marie would remain at court. An Italian marriage was favored by Queen Anne, who seemed to want Marie as far away from Louis as possible. And there was a good candidate,
the Grand Constable Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, a Roman prince, who had been proposed once to Marie before the king's marriage and who did not seem discouraged by her initial refusal. Meanwhile, Mazarin worked to destroy the affection and nostalgia that still seemed to consume the newly married king. He made sure Louis received reports that Marie had been welcoming possible suitors in Paris and was not conducting herself like a person stricken with grief.

Marie was not unrealistic. She had been grateful to be permitted to return to Paris, where, she wrote, “Prince Charles (of Lorraine) began to show me attentions which were not disagreeable to me.”
²⁶
A marriage arranged by her uncle, she knew, was inevitable, and at this point desirable. She wanted to have some influence in the matter. Still, she did not intend to consent to any marriage until after she had seen the king in person. The requisite meeting, where she would be introduced to the new French queen, took place in August, immediately after Marie-Thérèse was installed at Fontainebleau at the end of the long voyage to her new home. Marie had dreaded the moment, and her fears were even more justified than she had anticipated, for not only the new queen but even the king received her with a studied coldness. Her detractors had done their job well:

Marie turned her efforts to regaining some control over her feelings and also to the marriage plans that were being made for her with frightening speed. Charles de Lorraine was suddenly withdrawn from consideration as a result of the scheming of his uncle, who was worried that his nephew would gain too much personal power by a marriage into Mazarin's family, and he proposed himself in his nephew's place. Marie refused the old man's attentions, scoffing at his arrogance: “he took the nephew's place, without considering that at his age he could not play the role fittingly, and that his efforts to pursue me at the Cours and the Tuileries could not meet with the same success as the attentions of his nephew.”
²⁸
For advice and assistance, she trusted almost no one. Only the writings of her favorite authors gave her comfort, and she also turned to them for strategic counsel. “I needed a cure for my pain,” she wrote, “and so I put all my efforts toward finding one.” Marie enlisted her sister Hortense in helping her follow the advice to the lovesick found in Ovid's
Remedies to Love
. “Thus I practiced a part of what Ovid teaches for countering love. I removed from my sight all the objects that might keep my passion alive, and in search of a specious pretext for banishing it from my heart, I beseeched my sister, in whom I had the greatest confidence, to speak ill of the king to me.”
²⁹

Meanwhile, Cardinal Mazarin's health was rapidly declining. The parade of doctors he summoned to his rooms in the Louvre could no longer give him relief from the pain of gout and kidney disease. He knew his life was nearing an end. A marriage for Marie, one he hoped would keep her at a distance from the French court, and also for fourteen-year-old Hortense, were among his most compelling remaining projects. He turned to the Italian prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, and Marie finally gave her consent. Mazarin signed the marriage contract on February 21, 1661.

—Hortense Mancini,
Memoirs

 

 

 

 

F
ROM THE MOMENT that Marie stepped onto the galley ship taking her to France, her most loyal friend had been her young sister Hortense, living with her in the Mazarin palace, accompanying her on outings with the court at the Louvre and Fontainebleau palaces, and finally serving as her only confidant in exile in Brouage.

Although Marie's relations with her mother and uncle had always been strained, Hortense and her older sister Olympe enjoyed their favor. Even as a child of seven, the pretty Hortense was admired at court for her engaging ways. Cardinal Mazarin, it seemed, was immediately smitten with her. Olympe, for her part, had no trouble learning the arts of dissemblance and manipulation that were so crucial to social survival at court. She readily accepted the marriage that Mazarin arranged for her in 1659, to the Count of Soissons, and her new husband seemed not to object to her own flirtation with Louis XIV, which Mazarin encouraged to arouse Marie's jealousy.

Hortense watched all of this through the eyes of a child, and she took her own lessons from it. “I have told you,” she later wrote, “that my sister always wanted me to be in love.”
¹
But Hortense found that, unlike Marie, she was not romantically inclined. Her uncle, “who was very afraid that I might commit myself to someone out of love,” was reassured when even the spying and encouragement of their governess, Madame de Venelle, could not produce any evidence of romantic sentiment in his favorite niece, who flatly said of herself, “I had nothing in my heart.” She watched, perplexed, as Marie begged Hortense to help cure her of her love for the king, even as “my age did not allow me to really understand what she desired of me. All I could do to help her, since I could see she was miserable and I loved her dearly, was to weep with her over her misfortune, until such time as she could weep with me over mine.”
²
Her uncle kept a sharp eye on Hortense's reactions to the drama and expressed some concern that her sympathy for Marie would exert too strong an influence on her. “I observe with great displeasure that she is dragging Hortense into her way of thinking,” he wrote Madame de Venelle.
³
But nine-year-old Marianne, the youngest of the five Mancini sisters, had joined the little group in Brouage by late summer, and she sent more reassuring messages
to their uncle. Hortense, she reported, “thinks only of her pleasure, and loves you very much,” while Marie was often alone, “reading astrology, Plutarch, Seneca, and philosophy.”
⁴

Although romance was not to Hortense's liking, she had embraced the many pleasures of life at court and did not shun the ample attention she received there. Even as a girl, she was beautiful, with a sensuality in her features that drew men to her. Cardinal Mazarin had high marital ambitions for Hortense, first turning his eye to the young Charles Stuart. Heir to the throne of England, Charles had lived in France since Oliver Cromwell seized power and had Charles's father, King Charles I, executed in 1649. Charles Stuart himself had been the first to broach the idea of marrying Hortense, though Mazarin harbored some reservations about the young royal exile's future. In the end, after several discussions with English emissaries, Mazarin withdrew his niece from consideration. “The King of England has offered to marry my niece Hortense,” he told Mademoiselle de Montpensier, cousin of Louis XIV, “but I replied that he was paying me too great an honor.”
⁵

Other candidates for Hortense's hand included the Duke of Savoy, who had proposed the idea to Mazarin when the court traveled to Lyon to explore a possible marriage between Louis XIV and the duke's sister Marguerite. This option dissolved when it became clear that Mazarin's principal motive for publicly considering a royal betrothal to Marguerite was to prod the king of Spain into making a counterproposal for his daughter, Marie-Thérèse, to marry the French king. And although Mazarin had put off the overturned English king's overtures toward Hortense while he was in exile, after Charles II returned to London, the cardinal's interest had been piqued once again. But with the reversal of Charles's fortunes, the opportunity had been lost. His English ministers persuaded him to turn his back on Mazarin and focus on the prospect of a more ambitious marriage with the princess of
Portugal. He would have to wait to meet Hortense again in another chapter of her life.

After the king's marriage, Mazarin's degenerating health probably played a role in the choice he finally made for Hortense. Rushing to put his family affairs in order and to select a trustworthy nobleman who would not dissipate the inheritance he intended to provide Hortense and her future husband, he turned his attention to a supplicant who had long been pressing to marry this particular niece. Armand-Charles de la Porte de la Meilleraye, in line to acquire from his father the distinguished title of grand master of the artillery and marshal of France, had been obsessed with Hortense since she was a child of nine or ten. Now he was twenty-nine and she fourteen. Armand-Charles cut an odd, awkward figure at court and as an outsider could only observe the lively social circles of which Hortense often found herself at the center. He was devout and becoming increasingly fanatical in his religious habits, as intensely attracted to the more extreme forms of Catholic devotion as he was to this girl who was regularly scolded by her uncle for her lack of piety. In his declining physical state Mazarin may not have been thinking clearly, but he also may have seen in Armand-Charles a dim reflection of his own stubborn rise from modest origins. Armand-Charles's family had originally been small merchants and apothecaries but over three generations had managed to claw their way to noble rank. To Hortense's uncle, ever watchful over the wayward tendencies of his nieces and sharply aware of the temptations of the court, Armand-Charles's austere incorruptibility might have seemed just what the young bride needed to keep her pleasure-loving personality in check. Sobriety and discipline surely had positive advantages when it came to managing the fortune the cardinal intended to bestow on the couple.

In late 1660, Mazarin's doctors had given him two months to live. He suffered from a painful array of ailments, all of them seemingly converging to crush him. The doctors who surrounded him
argued over what course to take. Among others watching the spectacle there were mixed emotions, for the cardinal had more enemies than friends. In letters to a colleague, the celebrated physician Guy Patin described in excruciating detail the final weeks of Mazarin's life:

While he could still walk, the cardinal remained in the Mazarin palace at the center of Paris, close to the magnificent art collection lining the walls of his gallery, where he would wander at night, murmuring to himself, “I must leave all of this.” He was a rich man, perhaps the richest in all of Europe, and he had spent a lifetime building and defending the colossal reputation that came to be associated with his family name. Giulio Mazzarini, son of a Sicilian small landowner who had moved his family to Rome so the father could work as a household servant to the Colonnas, had become Jules Mazarin, a towering figure in French statesmanship, whose niece Marie would marry a Colonna prince. Mazarin wanted his name to bear a noble title and become part of his legacy.

When the cardinal contemplated which of his relatives could inherit his fortune and his name, the only surviving nephew, Philippe Mancini, did not seem to be a good candidate. His brother Alphonse had died in a schoolyard accident in 1658. In 1657, Mazarin had reestablished the military unit known as the king's musketeers and made sixteen-year-old Philippe its captain. But Philippe had little inclination for combat and he let his senior
comrade, the Count d'Artagnan, assume the role of captain. Philippe was a hedonist. He frequented the circles of the king's younger brother, and some said the two had an amorous relationship. The young Mancini quickly became notorious for his escapades, the most scandalous of which would be a wild three days of debauchery in 1659 at a country chateau, beginning on Good Friday. During this weekend, some of the invited guests composed an obscene series of verses parodying the “hallelujahs” that were part of the Easter liturgy. The verses and the story of the weekend orgy circulated in Paris not long afterward, and Philippe was abruptly shipped off to a military fortress in Brisach on the German border, where Mazarin left him for several months to reflect on his folly.