Mistresses

by Linda Porter

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  NONE OF THIS could have been foreseen by the dark, curly-haired child who waited to board a Genoese galley with her mother, aunt, elder sister Marie, brother Philippe and cousins Anne-Marie and Laura Martinozzi, in 1653. Her four-year-old younger sister, the baby of the family, Marianne, was left behind.1 They were leaving Italy from Rome’s port, Civitavecchia, now a busy cruise terminal, but then much more of a fishing harbour. The vessel that they were about to board had been specially commissioned by Mazarin from Genoese boatbuilders. It had been luxuriously fitted out for a relaxed voyage and Hortense’s subsequent description makes no mention of the twenty galley slaves who were compelled to row it. Instead, she remembered its elegance: ‘I will not stop here,’ she later wrote, ‘to describe that movable house. It would take up too much time to portray all its beauty, its order, its riches, and its magnificence. Suffice it to say that we were treated like queens there and throughout our voyage, and that the tables of sovereigns are not served with more pomp and brilliance than was ours four times a day.’2

  After a week’s leisurely crossing, the galley reached the French coast, landing in Marseille. The family then spent eight months in the south of France, living in Aix-en-Provence with Hieronyma’s eldest daughter, Laure-Victoire, who, at seventeen, was already the duchess of Mercoeur. Married to a husband twenty-four years her senior, Laure-Victoire had been in France for four years and was well placed to coach the new arrivals in the minutiae of French etiquette and what to expect when they arrived at court. Hortense and Marie listened carefully as their sister instructed them on the finer points of inviting and receiving guests, as amused as their mother was shocked to learn that visitors should be greeted with a kiss. They observed the luxurious manner in which Laure-Victoire lived (Hortense later wrote that her brother-in-law entertained her ‘in the most magnificent manner conceivable’) and a stream of local dignitaries bearing gifts brought home to them just how important their uncle the cardinal was in France.3

  This impression was reinforced when they arrived in the French capital in February 1654. Their uncle was then living in the Palais Mazarin, a building designed for him by two prominent French architects. What is left of it today forms part of the original site of the Bibliothèque Nationale on Rue de Richelieu in Paris’s second arrondissement. Though Mazarin was not much interested in acquiring property, his residence was filled with a collection of gems to rival any of his contemporaries in Europe. His wide-eyed nieces marvelled at objects of great value and breathtaking beauty. There were vases, plates, cups, goblets and small chests, all encrusted with precious stones, as well as exquisite crosses and chandeliers. Some of these pieces can still be seen in the Louvre.

  Almost before they had a chance to catch their breath, the Mancini girls were attending the wedding of their sixteen-year-old cousin, Anne-Marie Martinozzi, to the Prince de Conti. Anne-Marie’s husband was a member of a family that had been among the most aggressive rebels of the Fronde. They had accepted the need of an alliance with Mazarin’s family without enthusiasm. The bride herself, shimmering in ‘a dress of brocade enriched with pearls of very great price’, had no say in the matter, but her beauty and good nature ensured that her union with a man susceptible to occasional jealousy was largely a success.

  Mazarin, ever conscious of the watchful eyes of the French court, had inspected this latest cohort of his family at the Chateau de Villeroy at Corbeil, just to the south of Paris, before permitting them to proceed on the final stage of their journey. He needed to be sure that the children could speak French well enough and had learned sufficient of the elaborate social niceties to hold their own on a stage that was by no means automatically welcoming. The girls seemed to have passed muster initially, but the cardinal soon detected a problem. Hieronyma Mancini (or ‘de Mancini’, as she became to satisfy the punctilious snobbery of the French aristocracy) did not get on with her daughter Marie. At fifteen, Marie was already something of a rebel. Her own reference to ‘my poor eating habits’ and the alarm of those around her that she was much too thin suggests anorexia. She claimed that the months of being unsettled, combined with a temperament that was highly strung, ‘had reduced me to a pitiful state.’4

  Alarmed that this awkward and skinny girl would not pass muster in the salons of Paris or the receiving rooms of the Louvre Palace, Mazarin made a decision entirely predictable for the times in which he lived, even if nowadays we might question whether it would make a potentially difficult situation worse. He sent Marie, accompanied by Hortense, who was too young to participate in court life, to a convent, ‘to see, as he said,’ wrote Marie, ‘if it would fatten me up a bit.’ It was not clear with what culinary delights the sisters of the Convent of the Visitation, in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques, could cause Marie’s figure to bloom, but their credentials in education were much admired by the upper classes and, perhaps to her own surprise, Marie did well studying their curriculum, which was more broadly based than the education she had received in Rome. She and Hortense spent eighteen months in the convent before they were finally deemed acceptable in the rarefied society which awaited them. This period of enforced removal from the rest of their family forged a strong bond between Marie and Hortense, despite the seven-year age gap. They remained devoted to each other through all the vicissitudes of their remarkable lives, until Hortense’s death separated them nearly half a century later.

  Now much more confident – though no less inclined to stand up for herself – Marie knew that the search to find her a husband would accelerate. This led to further recriminations with her mother, who by now was very ill. As she approached death, Hieronyma shut her daughter out altogether. Lectures from her uncle had no effect on Marie and she and her mother were never reconciled. A couple of months after Hieronyma died, the wedding of Olympe Mancini to Prince Eugene of Savoy, comte de Soissons, was celebrated at Compiègne. The bride, who had been somewhat miffed to be passed over by the Italian d’Este family in favour of her cousin, Laure Martinozzi, had recovered from this snub to dazzle spectacularly at her own wedding, as was becoming the custom with Mazarin’s nieces. The Gazette de France reported that she was ‘dressed in a gown of silver cloth with bouquet of pearls on her head, valued at more than 50,000 livres, and so many jewels that their splendour, joined to the natural éclat of her beauty, caused her to be admired by everyone.’5 Cardinal Mazarin had now arranged superb marriages for both his Martinozzi nieces and two of the Mancini girls. He now turned his attention to the three Mancini girls who remained unwed. Marianne was too young for this to yet be a serious consideration but Marie and Hortense were not. They were both about to discover that the pain brought about by their uncle’s ambitions for them was far greater than the wealth and rank his influence could buy.

  Hortense had always been her uncle’s favourite. She sent him charming little letters, which pleased him, and it was evident that she would be considered the most beautiful of all his nieces. But she soon discovered that he would be relentless in imposing his will on the women of his family. After their mother’s death, a governess, Madame de Venelle, was appointed to supervise their daily lives. A rigid, strait-laced lady who stuck firmly to Mazarin’s instructions, Madame de Venelle never tried to be a replacement for their mother, and they would not, in any case, have been willing to accept her as such. She was certainly not cruel to Marie and Hortense but they viewed her with growing resentment, chafing under the restrictions she put on them and suspecting, with some justification, that she was as much a spy as a chaperone. Yet despite her dedication to her task, neither she nor the cardinal were able to prevent an episode which was to have repercussions for the rest of Marie’s life. It also left a powerful impression of the ephemeral nature of love on Hortense. In the summer of 1658, after surviving a dangerous illness, the twenty-year-old Louis XIV, unmarried and about to assume the reins of power for which Mazarin had so carefully prepared him, fell in love with Marie Mancini.

  Despite the lurid speculation of historical no
velists and even the misleading title of the most recent biography of the Mancini sisters, there is little evidence to support the view that this was a sexual relationship. Marie was not Louis XIV’s mistress, but she was the object of his first serious romance. The realization that the young couple’s feelings for each other were deepening dismayed both Anne of Austria, Louis’s mother, and Mazarin himself. True, he had sought titles and wealth for his nieces, but even he had not aimed at one of them becoming queen of France. Politically, he had emerged from the Fronde as undisputed first minister of France but he was well aware that he remained unpopular and that the French princes of the blood, of whom there were many, would be happy to take aim at him again. Up till now, he had viewed Marie as headstrong but manageable. Her hold over Louis XIV was a threat that needed to be quashed. Queen Anne had already made clear that her opposition to Marie as a wife for her son would be implacable, telling Mazarin, ‘I warn you that all of France would revolt against you and against him; and that I will put myself at the head of the rebels to restrain my son.’6 She was happy enough for this young Italian woman to encourage an interest in culture and the arts, which Louis had hitherto lacked, but there was no way she could contemplate someone of such comparatively low birth sharing his throne.

  Marie hoped otherwise. She spoke to Hortense of her love for Louis XIV but Hortense did not really understand the depths of her sister’s feelings. She tried to comfort and support Marie when the king’s exasperated mother made it clear to Mazarin that she could not have her son acting love-struck and uninterested in front of the delegation sent from Spain to negotiate a marriage for him with her own niece, Maria Teresa. Marie was, in effect, banished from the court, packed off to accompany Mazarin to the south-west of France. The cardinal himself continued onwards to the border with Spain, to seal the treaty that would end years of hostilities between the two countries. Marie, accompanied by Hortense and Marianne, was left in La Rochelle. There, she continued to correspond with Louis XIV, to the fury of her uncle and the concern of Hortense, who seems, despite the fact that she was barely a teenager herself, to have sensed that all this passion would not end well. Eventually, the king managed to spend a day with Marie and they agreed, with great sadness, that their romance was doomed. Hortense was present at their anguished parting, but she attached no blame to Louis for ending the liaison: ‘nothing,’ she recalled, ‘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.’7 However genuine these sentiments may have been at the time, Louis soon got over Marie. He accepted the inevitability of the Spanish marriage and meanwhile indulged in a little flirtation with Marie’s sister, Olympe, an unpleasant young woman only too happy to play the cardinal’s game, even if it did hurt her sister.

  Having fought and lost, Marie was unwilling to put up with such humiliation for any longer. Submissive and desperate, with only her sisters for support, she wrote to her uncle asking that he arrange a marriage for her without delay. He was pleased with her behaviour, saying that she would find in him, ‘a father who loves you with all his heart.’ Marie understood the nature of this new-found paternal affection but she still wanted some control over the selection of a husband. She found Charles de Lorraine pleasant enough, until his elderly uncle intervened to pursue her himself, much to Marie’s disdain. Lorraine would probably not have been acceptable to Queen Anne and the cardinal in any case, since such a marriage would have kept Marie at the French court. Anne wanted her out of the country altogether, afraid that she still exerted a hold on the emotions of the newly-wed Louis XIV. In February 1661, a marriage contract was signed by which Marie would return to Rome as the wife of an Italian prince, the Grand Constable Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna. Delayed by illness and her own reluctance to be parted from Hortense, Marie finally took up residence in the Roman mansion of her husband four months later. Eight difficult and eventful years passed before the sisters saw one another again, in circumstances neither could have anticipated, but which were perhaps, given their natures, not entirely surprising.

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  CARDINAL MAZARIN’S OWN health was failing at the start of 1661 and he knew that death was not far away. He needed to make sure that Hortense’s situation was settled quickly and that a suitable husband might be found for fourteen-year-old Marianne, the youngest of his nieces. To Mazarin, this was a sacred charge and would complete his bequests to the children of his sisters, who had become his dynasty. Hortense had not wanted for admirers. She was one of the most talked-about beauties at the French court and any husband could expect to acquire, through marrying her, an enviable portion of Mazarin’s enormous wealth. She was a prize fit for a king and, indeed, one had already come calling. In 1658, Charles II asked for Hortense’s hand but was rebuffed by Mazarin, who reported that he had told her suitor, ‘that he was paying me too great an honour.’ This withering sarcasm could not have escaped the exiled king of Great Britain, who was a penniless wanderer at the time, living on handouts from Spain in what is now Belgium. Mazarin had made peace with the English republic and was not about to annoy Oliver Cromwell by allying his favourite niece with someone whose prospects of ever regaining the throne seemed impossibly remote. His reservations vanished completely when Charles was unexpectedly restored in 1660, and the king was able to gain some measure of revenge by making it clear that the daughter of minor Italian nobles was not an appropriate choice to be his wife. There would be no Queen Hortense. But Charles II had undoubtedly been smitten by the girl when he first met her in Paris and his ardour was renewed when they met again seventeen years later.

  Cardinal Mazarin devoted all his remaining energy to arranging a suitable marriage for Hortense in the weeks leading up to his death. His favoured candidate was Armand-Charles de la Porte de la Meilleraye, a young man from a family with undistinguished origins (not unlike the cardinal’s own), whose father held the title of marshal of France. Armand was twenty-nine years old and Hortense not yet fifteen. He had, rather unhealthily, been infatuated with her since she was nine and was still as determined as ever to marry her, though he knew that she had other, more impressive suitors. As Mazarin fought to stay alive, racked by coughing fits and exhausted by insomnia, he decided that Armand would, in effect, fill the role of his only male heir. Philippe, the nephew he detested, had forfeited his right to inherit the cardinal’s riches through the kind of hedonism and recklessness that ran like tainted wine through the veins of the younger generation of the Mancini family. Out of consideration for her uncle and perhaps lured by the wealth with which he intended to endow her through this marriage, Hortense agreed to become Armand’s wife. The wedding took place at the Palais Mazarin on 1 March 1661. Eight days later, the great cardinal was dead and the new duke and duchess Mazarin, as Armand and Hortense now became, started their life together. That they were almost comically incompatible had not troubled Hortense’s late uncle. Yet it was to leave her, in her own words, ‘the richest heiress and the unhappiest woman in Christendom.’

  Hortense was actually married a month before her sister, Marie. Neither of them, nor, indeed, their siblings, marked the passing of Cardinal Mazarin with an outpouring of grief. ‘It is a remarkable thing,’ the new duchess Mazarin wrote later, ‘that a man of his merit, after having worked all his life to exalt and enrich his family, should have received nothing but expressions of aversion from them, even after his death.’ She went on, however, to explain the reasons for this apparently monumental ungratefulness and, in so doing, revealed the root of the unhappiness that would characterize the lives of the Mancini girls, marking them for ever afterwards. ‘If you knew with what severity he treated us at all times, you would,’ she claimed, ‘be less surprised by it. Never has a man had such gentle manners in public and such harsh ones at home; and all our temperaments and inclinations were contrary to his. Add to that incredible subjection under which he held us, our extreme youth, and the insensitivity and carelessness about everything which
excessive wealth and privilege ordinarily cause in people of that age, however good a nature they may have.’8