The Kings' Mistresses (7 page)

On his deathbed, Cardinal Mazarin turned to the most appealing solution: marry young Hortense to a religious nobleman with impeccable family credentials, and bestow on both of them the title of Duke and Duchess Mazarin. Others, including the father of the potential groom, had found Armand-Charles's unwavering fascination with the girl to be somewhat troubling and advised against the marriage, but the cardinal was determined to make the choice for his niece before he died, and in his moribund state he believed he was choosing an heir who would safeguard his fortune as well as his family honor. Armand-Charles, the Marquis de la Meilleraye, had been a faithful postulant for Hortense's hand and even seemed to bear no grudge after her uncle withdrew his approval for the union when it seemed for a time that a better match might be made with the future king of England.

And so the fourteen-year-old Hortense learned of her uncle's final choice for her in late February 1661. When she accepted, the cardinal gave her a gift to indicate his gratitude. “As soon as the marriage negotiations were concluded,” she later wrote, “he sent me a large cabinet in which, among other objects of value, there were ten thousand pistoles in gold. I shared them liberally with my brother
and my sisters, to console them for my opulence, which my sisters could not look upon without envy, no matter how they hid it.”
⁷
Ten thousand pistoles in Spanish gold coin were a sum equivalent to $1 million today.
⁸
The marriage was celebrated on March 1, and in the evening the king joined the bridal party at the Mazarin palace. Over the next few days the cardinal occupied himself with finalizing his will, leaving most of his material possessions to Hortense and her husband, the newly named Duke and Duchess Mazarin, and making his favorite niece, in her own words, “the richest heiress and the unhappiest woman in Christendom.” When the cardinal died on March 9, 1661, he left no genuine mourners among his family. “When we first heard the news,” Hortense wrote, “all that my brother and my sister did by way of grieving was to say to each other, ‘Thank God he's croaked!' To tell the truth, I was hardly any more afflicted.”
⁹

From the start, the Mazarin couple was positioned squarely at the center of the most favored social circles in the city and at court, where Hortense had already made her mark. Her youthful and fun-loving presence at the Louvre and especially at Fontainebleau, where with her sister she had been permitted to roam freely on horseback and on foot in the woods and gardens, had been noticed and admired. She had been at Queen Anne's regular gatherings and listened to her sister recite from memory her favorite speeches from Pierre Corneille's play
Le Cid
. She had learned to sing, play guitar, and speak French fluently, retaining only a slight accent that was thought to add to her charm. At the age of twelve, with Marie she had danced in the court ballet
Alcidiane,
which Molière had written to showcase the young king's dancing skills. Armand-Charles had married a young woman who was utterly comfortable with, and excelled at, a public life.

Their residence was the cardinal's sumptuous Mazarin palace, not far from the Louvre. As a showcase for the material wealth they had inherited, the place featured the magnificent gallery where the
cardinal had loved to pace in front of his grand collection of paintings. Now the palace was filled with young friends of Hortense and her lively brother Philippe. Armand-Charles watched this regular stream of fashionable visitors with some dismay, but at first he tolerated it. One wing of the palace had been left to the wayward Philippe, who would frequently join the gatherings his sister Hortense arranged. It was at these concerts and banquets that many of their friends first saw at close range just how astounding Mazarin's art collection was. It included nearly nine hundred paintings, many of them by Italian masters: Raphael, Caravaggio, Carracci, Giorgione, Mantegna, Titian, da Vinci. Even more impressive were the hundreds of statues from Roman antiquity lining the halls and filling the courtyard.

But the new Duke Mazarin did not like all this company, and in social gatherings at court, he had never felt at ease. He had seen the eleven-year-old Hortense dance with the king's brother at a ball during carnival, he had watched her practice perfect curtsies for the queen, and he had read the praises of the loveliest Mazarin niece in the gazettes following her first public appearances: “the adorable Hortense, that eastern star.” Cardinal Mazarin had first suggested to him that Marie, and then Olympe, might be suited to be his wife, but Armand-Charles had let it be known that he was in love with the child Hortense from the beginning. Now that he finally had the prize he had longed for, he could not bear watching others admire her. He began to restrict her comings and goings, forbidding the staging of plays and concerts in their residence and banning all the friends whose company his wife seemed to enjoy the most. Within a few months of their marriage, he insisted that she accompany him on long trips away from the capital to tour the most remote of the couple's provincial holdings. In the summer of 1661 the couple set out for Alsace, not to return until winter. When Hortense found that she could actually enjoy herself at a stop on
their journeys, her husband immediately made plans to leave. “As soon as he knew I was happy in some place,” she would later recall, “he would make me leave it, no matter what reasons there might be to keep me there.”
¹⁰
She became pregnant while they were in Alsace, and he waited until she was close to full term before bringing her back to Paris, making sure she remained strictly confined until well after their first child, Marie-Charlotte, was born in early 1662.

Louis XIV had given Duke Mazarin the title of governor of Alsace and royal administrator of extensive lands in Brittany. The duke embraced his responsibilities with an enthusiasm and sobriety that at first gratified, then alarmed the king. Armand-Charles's religious fanaticism was beginning to appear mad; he claimed the Angel Gabriel spoke to him in dreams. He obsessively interfered with the smallest details in his peasants' lives, claiming to want to help them walk the road to salvation. He objected to female domestics in the households of priests and warned poor farm families not to let brothers and sisters sleep in the same bed. He was troubled by the physicality of agricultural life, warning milkmaids against spending too long milking cows and suggesting that they practice more modest postures when tending to tasks such as churning milk. In his own household, he imposed rigid rules requiring that everyone go to bed early, discouraged conversation and laughter, and promptly dismissed any servant unfortunate enough to receive an expression of affection from his wife. Hortense later wrote:

Meanwhile, Hortense gave birth to two more daughters, Marie-Anne and Marie-Olympe, in 1663 and 1665. Three weeks after Marie-Olympe was born, the duke took his wife to family lands in Brittany, where he could more easily keep her away from society, and where she stayed until she became pregnant again. Once again, as late as possible in her pregnancy he brought her back to Paris, where finally she gave birth to a son, Paul-Jules, in 1666.

The arrival of a son and heir to the Duke and Duchess Mazarin was occasion for much public congratulation. Hortense's brother and sister Marianne, Duchess of Bouillon, were hopeful that the event would mark a more relaxed regimen in the Mazarin household. The poet Isaac de Benserade wrote a celebratory verse wishing the couple happiness:

However, the marriage was not improved by the arrival of little Paul-Jules. Having produced the requisite male heir and survived four pregnancies in five years, Hortense was eager to spend as little time with her husband as possible. But the duke was more possessive than ever. He became obsessed with the fear that his wife would leave him and determined to remove any possible means for her to do so. He demanded that she give him her jewels and had them removed from their residence so she would have no access to funds other than the modest allowance she had been allotted in her marriage contract. She later wrote:

Philippe and Marianne were becoming exasperated with their sister's reluctance to openly oppose her husband. Once she had produced a son, like many other women of her station, she might at least have been allowed to move into separate living quarters. But Armand-Charles wanted his wife closer to him than ever, and at first Hortense complied. Within a few months of their son's birth, the duke was pressing his wife to accompany him on one of the provincial voyages she so detested, this time to Brittany where he had volunteered to serve Finance Minister Colbert in the royal project to examine the financial affairs of all the cities in the realm. After a boring summer in Nantes, Hortense was dragged off to keep her husband company as he sought a cure for his permanently tormented mental state at the hot-water spas of Bourbon l'Archambault, where much to his consternation she encountered Philippe, himself enjoying a
brief respite from his own pleasure travels. Though Hortense was delighted to see Philippe, he was sorry to see her depressed. He and his sister had long conversations about the duke's erratic behavior, demanding ways, and apparent mismanagement of the couple's wealth.

Unlike Cardinal Mazarin, who had built a fortune based on material goods and moveable wealth, Armand-Charles was interested only in landed property. When the colossal Mazarin fortune became his, he threw himself into what he viewed as the most aristocratic of spending habits: making charitable donations to the church, and purchasing and managing land. The former, of course, was an investment without financial return, and he was taken advantage of at every turn. “Monks and holy men profited from his weaknesses and drew freely on his millions,” wrote Saint-Simon.
¹⁴
Immediately following his marriage, the duke had started to give away his money, often in the form of pensions guaranteed for life, to a seemingly haphazard array of individuals with whom he came into contact, from old family servants to doctors at the Sorbonne to aspiring nuns and priests in far-flung dioceses. Furthermore, in the late seventeenth century, real estate in the French provinces, the duke's only other financial interest, was not a good investment.

Hortense and her brother discussed the dwindling Mazarin fortune during their long evenings in Bourbon. Philippe admonished his sister for her tolerance. He warned her that she would forever be traveling to destinations not of her own choosing, perpetually getting pregnant, spending time in the most tiresome company, and being allowed none of the pleasures that her inheritance should have brought her. He urged her to appeal to the sympathy of both the king and Colbert to request a
séparation de biens,
or legal division of property, to safeguard at least her portion of the Mazarin legacy.

Such a request was not unprecedented, but the peculiar status of the Mazarin marriage contract made this move even more complicated
than it would have been had Hortense been wed under more conventional terms. Her uncle, obsessed with keeping his fortune intact and perhaps foreseeing a possible separation, had designed a marriage contract that gave the couple a common share of the inheritance but did not specifically protect Hortense's portion. Only her jewels were clearly hers and not her husband's, in the eyes of the law. All other property was subject to dispute. The terms of the inheritance had been kept deliberately vague, ensuring that Hortense would have to make an exceptionally strong legal case if she ever attempted an official
séparation de biens
.

And so when Hortense took the first step, immediately after returning to Paris in late 1666, toward a legal separation, she knew she was making a move that carried high risks. She knew her husband, and knew that she would not be dealing with a gracious nobleman like the Count of Lafayette, who, once he had acquired one or two sons, had been quite content to let his writer wife keep her own house in Paris where she could compose her novels and receive her friends while he remained on their provincial estates. Not only was Hortense's husband fanatically devout, but he also was obsessively jealous, a most ungenerous and unaristocratic combination of personality traits. “Jealousy,” wrote François de La Rochefoucauld, “is the greatest of all evils, and the one which excites the least pity in those who occasion it.”
¹⁵
Hortense certainly was beyond feeling any pity for her husband.