Mistress of the Vatican (18 page)

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Cardinal Pamphili’s astonishing love for his sister-in-law had blossomed unimpeded by the constant presence of his brother Pamphilio in the Piazza Navona house. Not much is known about Pamphilio after the Naples sojourn, and he seems to have lived a secluded life in the 1630s, perhaps due to illness.

Certainly late in the decade, if not earlier, he suffered greatly from kidney stones. In the summer of 1639 one, in particular, tormented him, blocking up the flow of urine, causing violent shooting pains, high fever, chills, and abdominal swelling. The normal rhythm of the family ceased as attention was focused on the sick man. Olimpia would have stopped going out in her carriage—except, of course, to church—as friends and neighbors dropped by to check on Pamphilio’s health. With the best of intentions, Pamphilio’s doctors would have tortured their patient unmercifully, siphoning off his blood with leeches, causing violent diarrhea with enemas and uncontrollable vomiting with herbs known as pukes, all in an effort to dislodge the large kidney stone.

But nothing worked. On August 29, Pamphilio lay in the sweltering heat of a Roman summer, drenching his sheets in sweat and moaning in pain. The end seemed near, and a priest was called to administer last rites, the sacred words to ease the dying person along the path to God. Gianbattista, Olimpia, and her three children would have knelt in prayer with bowed heads.

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It is hard for us to judge Olimpia’s feelings as her husband lay dying. It was Pamphilio who had brought her from the backwater of Viterbo into the excitement of Rome. It was this marriage that had given her noble rank, social position, and power within the Vatican courts. Any sadness might have been assuaged by the freedoms of widowhood, however. A rich widow over forty could administer her own legal and financial affairs without any interference from a man, and certainly this would suit Olimpia better than having a husband as titular head of her household.

As Pamphilio lost consciousness and his breath grew labored, it is likely that Olimpia’s eyes would have darted from her rosary beads to her servants. The author of a seventeenth-century book on household management related how servants of Italian noblemen, taking advantage of the uproar caused by their master’s death, routinely stole from the family while the body was still warm in bed. The hall sweepers pilfered the brooms, and the meat carvers swiped the knives. The keeper of the wardrobe became the stealer of the wardrobe. The bedchamber servants purloined the sheets. The wine steward filched the last wine bottle. And the cooks ran off with all the food, pots, and pans. Most disturbing, the family chaplain stumbled out of the house groaning under the weight of the silver Holy Sacrament service. It is likely, however, that when Pamphilio Pamphili breathed his last, and Gianbat-tista and Olimpia’s children dissolved into wretched sobs, Olimpia was making sure that not a single broom went missing.

Upon Pamphilio’s death, Olimpia, who had never cared much about clothes, immediately threw on widow’s weeds—a bone-chilling concoction of flowing black robes and a billowing black hood peaked over the forehead—which she would wear for the rest of her life. She wore velvet in winter, silk and satin in summer, over a plain white undergarment visible at the neck and wrists. These sober robes gave Olimpia the cachet of dignified virtue and offered the added advantage of saving her a great deal of money on clothing. In addition, she had put on weight in middle age, and black was always so slimming.

Olimpia paid for many Masses to be said for the benefit of her husband’s soul, as each Mass was believed to cut the deceased’s term in

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purgatory and speed him into heaven. Roman gossips, knowing she was much closer to her brother-in-law than she had ever been to her husband, said she put on these elaborate Masses and wore widow’s weeds only for show, or perhaps to ease her guilt over having been unfaithful to him with his brother.

The most salacious rumor was that Olimpia had actually poisoned the old fellow who had been a stumbling block in her love affair with Gianbattista. After all, her first husband had died suddenly at the age of twenty-three, and she had inherited all his money. But it is unlikely that Olimpia had poisoned Pamphilio, if only for the fact that she had been married to him, and very close to Gianbattista, for twenty-seven years by the time her husband died. If she was up to poisoning Pamphilio so she could roll around in bed with her brother-in-law more freely, she would have dusted off her arsenic decades earlier. Moreover, an autopsy proved that a shockingly large kidney stone had done him in.

Whatever Olimpia’s feelings about Pamphilio’s death, Cardinal Pam-phili was devastated. Two days later he wrote to a friend in Spain:

To the duke of Candia in Madrid.

I am obliged to your Excellency to inform you of the news of my family . . . , having lost the illustrious Pamphilio, my only brother, and head of this family at the age of 76, to my infinite grief, after a very painful illness of the stone, which turned out to have weighed six ounces, and was without remedy.

May it please the Lord God to keep him in glory, as I hope, for the resignation he always demonstrated to the divine will. I trust that Your Excellency will also be grieved, knowing what humanity has always accompanied your every sentiment. He has left an only son, my nephew Camillo, who will always recognize fully his obligations to serve Your Excellency. And so I kiss your hands, and pray for the prosperity of Your Excellency.

August 31, 1639 Rome.”
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With the passing of a family member, Olimpia’s
maestro di casa
would have hastened to the Jewish secondhand dealers to purchase a deluge of black bunting in which to drape the public rooms of the house, those

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that visitors saw. A house in mourning had all mirrors covered, as well as the chairs and tables, and black cloth was draped around all doorways and windows. Atop each door was hung the Pamphili family coat of arms, painted colorfully on large sheets of paper. The household used only black candles. The master of the stables covered the carriages in black and put black trappings on the horses. After the eight-month mourning period was over, the mountain of black cloth was usually sold back to the dealers.

While Olimpia was now legally entitled to administer her own Maidalchini-Nini money, Gianbattista insisted that she officially take charge of administering the Pamphili patrimony as well, which included payments for the comforts of his two sisters, Agatha and Pru-denzia, in their convents. Being appointed administrator of a noble family’s finances was a rare honor for a woman, but the ambassador of Mantua remarked that Olimpia deserved it for her “great intelligence and economy.”
⁷
He added, however, that the real reason was Gianbat-tista’s fear that if he did not show his sister-in-law sufficient respect, she would take all her money away from the Pamphilis by remarrying. Indeed, rumors abounded that Olimpia was going to marry Mario Fran-gipani, the scion of a line of princes stretching back much farther than the Colonnas, just to make Anna Colonna mad.

But Olimpia probably never considered a third marriage. First of all, now that she was forty-eight, there was no longer any talk of immuring her in a convent to protect her virtue. Tottering on the brink of the grave as she was, her advanced age alone would ensure her chastity. And surely she enjoyed being under no man’s thumb—even a hypothetical thumb, since no matter whom Olimpia married, she would run the show. Moreover, Olimpia was now fulfilling the responsibilities of a cardinal, doing much of her brother-in-law’s work. Anyone who wanted something from him was obliged to meet first with Olimpia, who would render a judgment and then tell Cardinal Pamphili what to say.

“It was said that if one wanted some favor from the Cardinal, he would have to ask the sister-in-law,” Gregorio Leti explained. “But those who needed her for some affair were not permitted to address themselves to others. When they left the Cardinal little satisfied, he never

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grew angry but as they were leaving said, ‘Perhaps he has not yet spoken to Donna Olimpia.’ ”
⁸

In addition to her work as a cardinal, Olimpia had three children to think about and had, for some time, been plotting their futures. There was her only son, seventeen-year-old Camillo, now the official head of the family, although Olimpia would always hold the real power. And then there were two daughters. None of the three, she vowed, would enter the church. That would be a waste. Olimpia didn’t mind paying a large dowry for her girls as long as they married into powerful families, creating a network of support and prestige for her.

Olimpia’s daughters remain a cipher and seem to have lived in their mother’s shadow. There are no known portraits of them. Neither are there any descriptions whatsoever of their beauty or lack thereof, which might indicate they were average-looking, neither waddlingly fat nor anorexically thin, neither radiantly beautiful nor clock-stoppingly ugly. Ambassadorial reports treat Maria and Costanza Pamphili as extras in the family saga, sweeping in and out of church ceremonies and family banquets with long silken skirts.

A few years later, one diplomat reported that of Olimpia’s three children, the pious elder daughter, Maria, was Gianbattista’s favorite. The youngest child, Costanza, “has no influence but is a good lady, and cannot be decried without doing her injustice, but neither can she be praised without exaggeration.”
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Given the universal lack of comment on their personalities, it is clear that they were in no way like their mother, whose forceful intelligence was much remarked upon.

In 1640 the twenty-one-year-old Maria married a promising young man of excellent family. The marquess Andrea Giustiniani was attractive and likeable, and even if he was not rich himself, he had very rich relatives. But Gianbattista thought the groom had uncouth manners and put up with him only for Maria’s sake. The marriage soon proved fruitful. Within the year Maria had her first child, whom she named after her mother. But to distinguish the two Olimpias, the baby was called by the Italian diminutive, Olimpiuccia. She would prove much like her namesake in terms of her willfulness.

Olimpia fell in love with the infant at first sight. Here was someone

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she could truly give herself to, a noncompeting female, weak, needing to be nurtured and guided. Here was a safe place to pour out her love, to teach a girl the valuable lessons she had learned so painfully. Olimpia insisted she raise the child in her Piazza Navona palace. The parents gave her up willingly; after all, they were disappointed their child was not a boy. It would prove to be the deepest, longest-lasting love of Olim-pia’s life. In Olimpiuccia she would endeavor to create a new Olimpia in her own image.

Immediately after her granddaughter’s birth, Olimpia called in her attorney to write a new will, arranging to leave the infant her own Maidalchini-Nini wealth, thereby disinheriting Camillo, who would receive only his father’s wealth, which was, alas, not much. In an era when family assets were invariably hoarded for the son, Camillo must have greatly resented his mother’s taking money away from him to give to a girl, and an infant at that. And Olimpia must have had a good laugh at her son’s anger. Camillo was the cliché of a weak son dominated by a strong mother, and they bore each other a hearty dislike.

Camillo seemed the exact replica of his father. He had Pamphilio’s sparkling dark eyes, wavy black hair, and strong, chiseled jaw. But as attractive as Camillo was, he was a bit of a dolt. There is no record of Camillo’s having attended one of the excellent boys’ schools in Rome, and Gregorio Leti reported that Olimpia hired tutors to teach him Latin, arithmetic, and deportment for as long as they could persuade him to sit still. With undisguised venom Leti added that Camillo was “so ignorant that he barely knew how to read at the age of twenty.”
¹⁰
The French ambassador described the good luck the mediocre Camillo had in being born into the right family, sniffing, “Fortune supplied him with what nature had declined to give.”
¹¹

As a result, Camillo grew up with the varnish of a seventeenth-century gentleman. He excelled at horsemanship and could cut a pretty figure on the dance floor. He crafted poetic verses with more enthusiasm than wit and spent hours at a time designing imaginary gardens on paper. He admired the great art collections of the cardinals and strolled imposingly around their galleries, tilting his head this way and that to examine statues and paintings. Camillo was charming. Camillo was

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polite. But Camillo was all varnish and no substance. He seemed to have no drive to excel in politics or finance, and he dragged himself through each day with a general air of lassitude.

If Olimpia looked at her son and heir with ill-concealed disappointment, she must have consoled herself with the knowledge that she had enough brains and ambition for the whole family. It was she, a poorly educated woman, who had raised the Maidalchini and Pamphili clans from nothing to the pinnacle of greatness. Looking at the inert, inept, insipid Camillo from her lofty position, she realized he was a hopeless ditherer.