Mistresses

by Linda Porter

  The duke and duchess Mazarin (he was denied the ‘de’ in front of the surname because of his lower social standing) moved into apartments in the Palais Mazarin, surrounded by reminders of the cardinal’s wealth. Everything about the place breathed riches and luxury, from the bejewelled vases and plate to the unrivalled collection of statuary and paintings to the opulent furnishings and tapestries. Unhappily for Hortense, it really was to become a gilded cage. Like all women of her age, she was her husband’s property, unable to dispose of any item in her uncle’s collection without Armand’s permission. And the object the duke most jealously guarded was his wife herself.

  The extent of what was to become a full-blown obsession, handily spiced with growing religious mania, was not immediately apparent in Duke Mazarin. The couple made at least a minimal effort to get along and to live up to their place in Parisian society, aware that all eyes were upon them. There was certainly nothing obviously disconcerting in Armand’s appearance and manner. He was presentable, in the fashion of the times, with the full wig and pencil moustache sported by the king and copied by so many men of fashion. Well dressed and cultured, he could have fitted in perfectly well and perhaps educated his young and frivolous wife to share his interests. Nothing, to those who knew him casually, especially marked him out as the man he was so soon to become. His own father, however, thought differently. Armand’s capacity for jealousy and his possessiveness disturbed Charles de la Porte, who had foreseen trouble from the outset.

  It was not long coming. Afraid that his wife was at least flirting with Louis XIV in a dangerous manner, Armand brought in a Provençal woman, Madame de Ruz, ostensibly as a friend to replace the ever-present governess, Madame de Venelle. The unsuspecting Hortense did not at first realize that she had swapped the cardinal’s dragon for one in her husband’s pay. Soon, he was restricting her social life in Paris, dictating who she could and could not receive in their home and banning all theatrical events and concerts at the Palais Mazarin. Viewing Paris as too tempting a place for his much-admired and flighty young wife, he resolved to take her away. He had been given a number of regional governorships and local offices by Louis XIV, and now determined to pursue his responsibilities doggedly, with his wife at his side. Hortense remembered this period of her marriage with indignation:

  The deceitful behaviour of Monsieur Mazarin in the choice of this woman, at a time when he could not yet have had any cause to complain of me, is enough to show you his suspicious nature and the frame of mind in which he had married me. As he was fearful of having me stay in Paris, he constantly moved me around among the lands that he possessed and governed. During the first three or four years of our marriage I made three trips to Alsace and as many to Brittany, not to mention several others to Nevers, to Maine, to Bourbon, to Sedan and elsewhere.

  Since Armand was always with her on the rare occasions they were at the French court, even the attractions of Paris began to fail. She simply could not get away from him. ‘Perhaps,’ she went on, ‘I never would have tired of that vagabond life if he had not taken excessive advantage of my accommodating nature. Several times he had me travel two hundred leagues while I was with child and even very near to giving birth.’9

  In the first five years of her marriage, Hortense had done her duty and given birth to four children, often in difficult circumstances, as her memoirs reveal. That the three girls and the long-awaited son (Paul-Jules, born in 1666) were all healthy is a testament to Hortense’s robust physique and her determination to cling on. Her husband allowed her no friends, no stability, and moved her on as soon as she showed any sign of settling contentedly in one place. At the same time, his religious devotion, which had always been marked, began to turn into a recognizable mania. This took forms ranging from the disturbing to the hilarious. At the same time that he was holding conversations with the Angel Gabriel in his dreams, the duke Mazarin was becoming an agricultural prude, worrying that milkmaids would be corrupted by the sexual excitement of milking cows, or titillated by milk-churning. He found the earthiness of peasant life disconcerting. This was, though, nothing to the tyranny he was imposing on his unhappy and deeply frustrated wife. For while he was taking a hammer to the genitals of the priceless statuary at the Palais Mazarin, to the horror of his servants, who well understood the value of the collection, he was equally determined to ensure that his wife should hand over all of her jewels and possessions to him. It had dawned on Armand’s troubled mind that his wife might rebel and even think of leaving him. He had long suspected her intentions, though without any justification. He could only be sure of her complete subjugation if she was penniless.

  This was the last straw for Hortense. On the pretext that he was afraid, because of her natural generosity, that Hortense would give her remaining jewels away, he appropriated them one evening while she was out. Clearly, Hortense was not quite so much of a prisoner at the Palais Mazarin as she made out, but this temporary absence cost her dear. Remonstrations had no effect. Armand did not indulge in shouting matches; it was not his style. Facetiousness and malicious jokes reduced Hortense to tears. She fled through an adjoining door to the wing of the palace in which her brother, Philippe, duke of Nevers, resided. From there, they sent for the youngest Mancini sister, Marianne, who had been married to the duke de Bouillon since 1662 and who had been given the responsibility of bringing up the children of her eldest sister, Laure-Victoire, who died in 1657. Unlike Armand, Marianne’s husband adored his wife and admired her literary efforts, while overlooking her love affairs and her increasing girth. This degree of freedom made Marianne confident and forthright. She had little time for Hortense’s sufferings. Both Marianne and Philippe counselled an official separation, and as soon as possible, while there was still enough of their uncle’s wealth remaining to form the basis of a sensible division of goods between Hortense and Armand. The arcane terms of Hortense’s marriage contract made this exceptionally difficult. Only her jewels, despite what Armand might say, were legally hers. Anything else was open to dispute and Hortense knew her husband well enough to anticipate a protracted legal battle.

  Her first attempt at leaving her husband saw her temporarily staying with her sister, Olympe, until Colbert, Louis XIV’s chief minister, given the unenviable task of mediating the dispute, ordered her to return to Armand, albeit with somewhat greater freedom in the choice of her own household servants. The ‘reconciliation’ was over as soon as it started. Refusing Armand’s commands to accompany him to Alsace, Hortense entered the convent of Notre-Dame-des-Chelles, in the Val de Marne, north of Paris, where one of Armand’s aunts was abbess. If she had feared for a severe reception from this relative, she was taken aback; the abbess was gentle, non-judgemental and far from impressed by her nephew. Irritated by the apparently pleasant life his wife was leading at Chelles, Armand had her brought back to the Convent of the Visitation, near the Bastille, where the nuns were stricter.10 He went to see Hortense there but was as incensed by her refusal to accompany him to Brittany as he was by her adoption of one of the current high-fashion trends – beauty spots of black taffeta applied to the skin, which ladies used to highlight the pallor of their complexions. Armand set off for Brittany in high dudgeon and Hortense was allowed to plead her case personally with Louis XIV, but the opposition of his finance minister, Colbert, threatened to drag things on interminably. Hortense seemed destined to languish at the convent in Paris unless she obeyed her husband. And then she met another detainee, seventeen-year-old Marie-Sidonie, marquise de Courcelles, who fundamentally changed her outlook. Confined at the convent under accusation of adultery, the young marquise had powerful friends at court and she knew how to use them. Together, she and Hortense formed an intense friendship – possibly the first lesbian relationship of Hortense’s life – and determined to take on the might of the French legal establishment, so heavily weighted against married women.

  Marie-Sidonie provided the impetus and hope that the increasingly depressed duchess Mazarin needed and which
her family had failed to provide. Hortense had watched her sister, Marie, wallow in the despair of one of the doomed romantic heroines of the Italian novels that she read to Louis XIV as a love-struck teenager. Now, she was back home in Italy, leading the life of a Roman society lady. Her own troubles would eventually become overwhelming. The other sisters, Olympe and Marianne, dispensed advice and offered occasional physical shelter but were too self-centred to become closely embroiled in Hortense’s marital dramas. Laure-Victoire had died shortly after their mother, in 1657, after giving birth to her third child. But Marie-Sidonie was a breath of fresh air. ‘As she was very attractive and amusing,’ remembered Hortense, ‘I obliged her by taking part in some jokes she played on the nuns. People told the king a hundred ridiculous stories about it: that we put ink in the holy water font, so that those good ladies would smudge up their faces; that we went running through the dormitory as they were falling asleep with lots of little dogs, shouting tallyho; and several other things of the sort, which were either completely invented or excessively exaggerated.’11 Further adventures followed when the young women were sent back to Chelles and panicked when they thought Hortense’s husband was coming to remove her by force. They secreted themselves behind a grille in the parlour of their room, only for Hortense to become wedged between two iron bars. Despite her agony and fright, she kept silent and, after a long period of tugging, Marie-Sidonie got her out. But as the lawsuit between the Mazarins dragged on, it became obvious to Hortense and to her brother, Philippe, that she needed a more permanent escape. She would have to flee the country.

  *

  HORTENSE HAD ENDURED seven years of a disastrous marriage. She had seen her vast fortune dissipated and her life crumble to nothing, dictated by an increasingly unhinged husband whose sole aim, so it seemed, was to control and confine her, to make sure that she never knew happiness or stability. And despite some temporary judgements in her favour in the courts of law, she also knew that Armand could pursue other legal avenues. Her main hope was that the king would keep his promise not to interfere in the Mazarins’ quarrels and if she did manage to escape Louis XIV would not try to bring her back. Philippe, standing by his sister, was instrumental in making the arrangements for her flight, though it was thought best that he not accompany her. If all went well, he could join her later. As few people as possible were apprised of her intentions. Hortense left on the night of 13 June 1668, accompanied by her brother’s manservant and her own lady’s maid. Both women were dressed as men. Later, she would acknowledge that the disguise was far from convincing but it seems to have given her an early taste for cross-dressing that she would indulge during her wanderings. At the Porte Saint-Antoine, the little party of three was joined by Hortense and Philippe’s closest ally, the chevalier de Rohan, who provided his own squire as an escort. Hortense’s plan was to travel east through Lorraine and Switzerland to join Marie in Milan.

  The journey did not go smoothly. Hortense had a fall in the gardens of the palace of the duke of Lorraine, in Nancy, and by the time the travelling party reached Altdorf, near the St Gotthard Pass in Switzerland, her leg was troubling her so much that she feared the onset of gangrene. Forced to remain in Altdorf by the threat of plague in Milan, Hortense received medical attention and recovered. Unwisely, she also added a new tension to the difficult situation of the fugitives by taking Rohan’s squire, Courbeville, as her lover. Philippe, who, by now, had set out to join his sister, was exasperated by her behaviour, but he knew that the real threat still lay with Duke Mazarin. A man of Mazarin’s disturbed and vindictive character was not going to sit back and accept that his wife had run off and left him. Philippe knew that Mazarin’s threat to kidnap Hortense and bring her back to France must be taken seriously. In his fury, Mazarin threw mud at all those he viewed as his enemies, even accusing Philippe of incest with Hortense. Hortense was appalled that ‘such odious use could have been made of the exchange of thoughts and feelings between people who are so closely related, finally, that my esteem and friendship for a brother whose merit was as well known as his, and who loved me more than his own life, could have served as a pretext for the most unjust and the cruellest of all defamations.’12

  Two years later, Hortense left Italy and returned to France. She did not really accept the prospect of a successful outcome to the mediation proposed to end the marital strife between herself and Duke Mazarin but she had not seen her children since 1668. It soon became apparent that her time in France would be brief. Duke Mazarin was implacable and his wife, having tasted freedom, was willing to risk a wandering life for the personal freedom it offered. She wanted lovers and enjoyment, the thrill of not being tied down. In the early 1670s, Marie’s marriage also collapsed. She and the Constable Colonna had drifted apart as both pursued love affairs of their own and Marie began to dabble in the kind of necromancy that had attracted her father. The two sisters roamed Europe together, notorious for their beauty and immoral lifestyle. The Mancinis’ lives appeared stranger than fiction because they wanted a kind of freedom that was not possible for women of their time. Whether this made them self-indulgent hedonists, able to survive because members of their own social class viewed them as amusing and took pity on them, or early examples of liberated women, struggling for identity and independence in a male-dominated society, is a good question.

  Hortense eventually acknowledged that the relentless pursuit of freedom could be wearying. She settled in Savoy and wrote her memoirs in Chambéry, where, she noted, ‘I have finally found the peace I had been seeking fruitlessly for so long, and where I have remained ever since, with much more tranquillity than a woman as unfortunate as I should have!’13 Alas, the peace she had found was fleeting. In 1675, the duke of Savoy, her protector, died. His widow was not inclined to extend any further hospitality to such a notorious fugitive. Hortense was wondering where on earth to go next when she received an unexpected invitation. It was from Ralph Montagu, whom she had known when he was a diplomat in Paris. He suggested that she might like to visit England. Like everything that concerned Ralph, it was not without an ulterior motive.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Last Mistress

  ‘For since our good king, with all his good parts, hath a weak side towards women, as great Henry the 4th . . . his grandfather, I think it much more honourable for Great Britain to have its monarch subdued by a famous Roman dame, than by an obscure damsel of little Brittain, or by a frisking comedian’

  A coffee-house conversation, in December 1675, between two Frenchmen and two Englishmen, reported in the State Papers of Charles II

  HORTENSE LEFT CHAMBÉRY regretfully in October 1675. She had decided that England would be her destination but she was in no hurry to get there. The length and route of her journey was partly dictated by the need to avoid France altogether. It would not be long before word of her departure spread and her husband would soon have preparations made to detain her if she set foot in France again. And there was something about Hortense’s personality and the life she had chosen that, full of uncertainty and danger as it was, had by now made her accept and even welcome time spent on the road. She knew that every stage of her circuitous journey through Switzerland, Germany and the Dutch provinces would be the subject of comment and speculation. She was a celebrity, a rebellious wife in constant flight from an unstable, vengeful husband. No wonder she was the talk of the coffee houses in London, famous for being famous, this ‘Roman dame’, admired so much for her ‘great beauty, quality and adroitness, of which there is so great a character in print’ that the gossips thought she would have a stronger power over the king, if she became his mistress, than ‘the obscure damsel of little Brittain’ (it is hard to think of a description more wounding to the snobbish pretensions of Louise de Kéroualle) or the ‘frisking comedian’ that was Nell Gwyn.1

  The duchess Mazarin travelled slowly, with a small entourage, calling on old friends who could provide accommodation and company, and she was followed, for part of her travels, by
her erstwhile companion Sidonie de Courcelles, who now took a more haughty and dismissive view of Hortense. There was little sisterly support left in Sidonie’s references to the woman she had shared high jinks with at the Parisian convent to which they had both been confined years before; hers are the barbs of someone who resented Hortense’s fame: ‘what is extraordinary,’ she wrote peevishly, ‘is that this woman triumphs over all her disgraces with an excess of folly that has never been seen. After experiencing this misfortune she thinks only of pleasure. Arriving here she was on horseback, wearing a wig and feathers, with twenty men in her escort, talking only of violins and hunting parties, in short, anything that gives pleasure.’2

  Hortense and her party were then in Geneva but they knew they had to move on. It was November and winter was fast approaching. She wanted to be in England before the end of the year but when she finally reached the Dutch coast at the port of Brill (a town familiar to Charles II and the exiles of the Civil Wars), the weather was so bad that there was no immediate prospect of setting sail. Reports in the English State Papers are full of ships being delayed or shipwrecked in storms. Then, just a week before Christmas, a correspondent in Harwich noted that a packet boat had arrived at Southwold in Suffolk after a very stormy crossing from Brill in Holland, bearing not just mail but a lady with six or seven servants, ‘who, they say, is related to the duchess of York.’3 The lady was the duchess Mazarin and the country in which she had so shakily set foot on 18 December 1675 was to be her home for the rest of her life.

  Opinion in England was divided as to why she had arrived and the motives of the various parties who might have had an interest in persuading Charles II to issue her the invitation to his realm in the first place. Hortense was not your usual type of asylum seeker, even by seventeenth-century standards, when it was not uncommon for members of the nobility or educated classes to fall foul of a particular regime and spend long periods away from their native lands. The king himself certainly knew the reality of being homeless. But Hortense’s notoriety as a runaway wife and the colourful life she had led marked her out from the normal run of political exiles. On the face of it, what she needed most was a roof over her head and some degree of financial support while she continued to battle her husband for her share of the wealth that Cardinal Mazarin had endowed them with shortly before his death. But there were suspicions voiced that, while the lady herself might have little knowledge of English politics, she could be very useful to those who did. Perhaps even Louis XIV himself, whose view of Louise de Kéroualle’s usefulness had always been rather guarded, might, it was suggested, see Hortense as an alternative. But in the coffee houses, this was considered ‘a speculation indeed too poetical.’