CHAPTER SIXTEEN
An Italian Girl in Paris
‘It is necessary to observe all the proprieties in Paris because everyone is closely watching the conduct of my nieces’
Cardinal Jules Mazarin, January 1660
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE produced an army of remarkable ladies – letter and memoir writers, courtiers and courtesans, actresses and novelists, gossips and great beauties, adventuresses and criminals. Among the most exuberant of these women was one who, as a little girl of seven, had come to France with her family to join two older sisters, one of whom had already married a French duke. The child was Ortensia Mancini, daughter of Lorenzo Mancini and Hieronyma Mazzarini, both of whom came from the lower ranks of Roman nobility but were only distantly connected to the leading Italian aristocratic families. The child’s life, had she remained in Italy, would have been one of quiet respectability; a convent education and a respectable, but not brilliant, marriage. The journey she made in the spring of 1653 would change all that. In Paris, she soon became known by the French version of her name, Hortense, but her future lay in the hands of her uncle, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, her mother’s elder brother. As chief minister to the young Louis XIV, he was not just the leading politician in France, but one of the foremost statesmen in Europe. His wealth and power had opened up possibilities for his two sisters (Hieronyma’s widowed sibling Laura Margherita Martinozzi and her own two daughters travelled with them) and their families. For in these children, seven nieces and two nephews, Cardinal Mazarin was determined that his legacy would live on. They were his flesh and blood and, for Mazarin, as with all seventeenth-century Europeans, family was everything. He would endow them with all the riches, titles and splendour that his position could bring. Yet while they all had outstanding good looks and distinctive personalities, the one thing they would conspicuously lack and that their uncle simply could not arrange for them was the simplest of all: he could not buy them happiness. More than a century would pass before the French revolutionary, St Just, remarked that happiness was a new idea in Europe. Its absence would certainly be keenly felt by the beautiful nieces of Cardinal Mazarin.
His achievement in reaching the height of power in France was, nevertheless, a story of which his relations could be rightly proud. Born Giulio Mazzarini in the Abruzzo in 1602, he had used his great charm, intelligence and gambler’s instinct first as a client of the influential Colonna family and then in the diplomatic service of the papacy. Handsome and witty, he had an infinite capacity to please and was a very quick learner. It may well have been the fact that he had risen on his own resources, without the natural advantages of high birth and family connections, that made him so keen to ensure a future for his sisters’ offspring. He had been in France since 1634, when he was appointed papal nuncio to the court of Louis XIII. There, he attracted the attention of Cardinal Richelieu, who admired his style and abilities, and took him under his wing. Given such a patron, it seemed only natural for Giulio Mazzarini to become Jules Mazarin. He took French citizenship in 1640 and, two years later, he was made a cardinal. When both Richelieu and Louis XIII died within a few months of each other in 1643, Mazarin’s time had come. Although a regency council had been appointed to govern in the name of the five-year-old Louis XIV, in practice it was Mazarin and the child’s mother, Anne of Austria, who ruled the country. Theirs was a very close relationship – wagging tongues suggested it was sexual, though it was probably not – based on the fact that they were two outsiders thrust into positions of power unexpectedly. Mazarin had spent time in Spain as a young man and spoke the language well. It was Anne’s native tongue (the French called her Anne of Austria because she was a Habsburg, though she was the daughter of Philip III of Spain) and her evening briefings on foreign affairs from Cardinal Mazarin were the highlight of her day. Throughout the 1640s, when France was engulfed in the civil unrest of the Fronde, almost as serious as the Civil War in England, they formed an unbreakable attachment. It was natural that she should support him in his ambitions for his Italian family. They would be received at court, educated as members of the French nobility and would make appropriate marriages. There was only one male among them, Philippe, whose title of duc de Nevers was purchased for him by Mazarin in 1660. The parlement of Paris, however, refused to register it, a sign of how unpopular the cardinal remained, well after the disturbances of the Fronde were over. Neither could his nieces, despite their beauty and high spirits, ever quite escape the distaste which many of the old French nobility felt for their upstart uncle. It would have a profound effect on their lives.
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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 novelists 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
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.
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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.