Mistress of the Vatican (67 page)

On September 15, Camillo wrote, “Seeing that the contagion of Vit-erbo is losing steam and virulence, this news fills my soul with joy in every respect, but particularly on behalf of Your Excellency, and of my aunts the nuns, to whom I ask Your Excellency to commend me. Here, God be praised, we are completely free from any illness. In our house we all enjoy perfect health.”
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At some point between September 17 and 20, perhaps in the magnificent frescoed rooms designed for her by Bernini, a flea jumped onto Olimpia. Perhaps it sprang onto her black wool stocking and worked its way up, past the leather garter buckled just above the knee, onto the flesh of the thigh.

Three or four days after the flea bite, Olimpia shivered in the Sep-tember warmth. Shrugging it off, perhaps she reached for a shawl. But then her body temperature rose rapidly to between 103 and 106 degrees. Buboes appeared. Examining the sore black boils in her groin and armpits, Olimpia could no longer deny that she had caught the plague.

She was tormented by unquenchable thirst, vomiting, diarrhea, headache, and hallucinations. She probably knew that death normally occurred within three to six days after the first symptoms. If she could

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hold out till the seventh or eighth day, she would have a good chance of recovery.

Gripped by utter exhaustion, Olimpia took quickly to her bed. After Innocent’s death, she had removed his papal throne from the audience chamber she had built for him and placed her bed there, where the throne had stood on its dais. It was the largest, most beautiful room in the palace, with its ornate movable ceiling, windows on three sides, and a gorgeous view of the medieval church, the town crouched at its stone feet, and the blue hills in the distance.

Though doctors must have been hard to come by, evidently Olimpia found one, according to a letter written by her relative Cardinal Gualte-rio. The most important step to save her life was to drain the buboes. But Olimpia’s buboes did not come to a head. “They could not pop the nodes without great inconvenience, if they did not cut them out,” Gual-terio wrote.
¹⁷

None of Olimpia’s family or friends was with her during her illness. It was reported that her servants, fearful of contagion, deserted her. Gregorio Leti stated that there was no priest at hand to take her last confession and ease her way to the next world with the comforting sacred rites. This could very well have been true, considering that the San Martino priests might have died or fled town.

For decades Olimpia had accumulated, acquired, and embezzled to stanch her fear and keep herself safe. But now not all the money in the world could help her, not all the gorgeous palaces could stop the infection, not all the power she had ever wielded could prevent destruction caused by a microbe lodged inside the stomach of a flea.

On September 26, 1657, the indomitable Olimpia Maidalchini Pam-phili, princess of San Martino and former mistress of the Vatican, died, and quite possibly she died alone.

We can imagine her soul rising through the gold-embroidered velvet hangings of her four-poster bed, up to the painted movable ceiling and through the huge white dove on the papal crest of Innocent X. She rose through the empty space above the ceiling, with its pulleys and levers, and out through the roof. Above the palace, she could see the 250 houses she had built for dowerless girls.

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In the distance soared the spires of Viterbo, the town of her birth, which had threatened to devour her but which she had long ago conquered. And farther south in Rome rose the magnificent dome of Saint Peter’s, which she had also subjugated, even though she had had the misfortune to be born a woman.

Now that her pain had stopped, and her heart had stopped, she was suddenly truly free for the first time in sixty-six years. Free in a way she had never imagined. In this freedom she needed neither wealth, position, nor power, for no prison threatened her now. Now, finally, she was free of greed, free of flesh.

Free, even, of fear. Olimpia was finally safe.

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27

After Olimpia

q

All our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more.

—William Shakespeare,
Macbeth
amillo was summoned from Rome. According to some reports, he found his mother naked on a stripped bed because her servants, having come back to check on her, had robbed the corpse and bed hangings.

Given the threat of contagion, the body had to be buried immediately. Luckily, her tomb was already prepared in the Church of San Martino, right next door to her palace. But there was the little matter of a coffin. With so many recent deaths, all the coffins in San Martino, and in Viterbo for that matter, were already six feet under—actually, eight feet under in the case of plague victims. Camillo rooted around the palace and in the basement found some packing crates that had been used to bring furniture from Olimpia’s Piazza Navona palace out to San Martino. These were hammered into a makeshift coffin. Washed and dressed, Olimpia was interred in the shabby box, which many saw

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as divine retribution for her having caused the same treatment of Innocent.

There is an unconfirmed story that when they lifted Olimpia’s body into the coffin, the head turned to one side, the mouth dropped open, and Camillo saw three huge diamonds hidden inside her cheek. Given her attention to worldly goods, it is possible that Olimpia, knowing she could very well fall into a coma and be robbed by her servants, might have secreted such valuable gems in a place where she would wake to find them. No one would stick their hands into the miasma-spewing mouth of a comatose plague victim.

We have a detailed description of how Olimpia was dressed for burial, given by a certain Antonio Bernardini, who opened her tomb in 1762. Camillo’s grandson Prince Girolamo Pamphili had died, having uttered the express wish to be buried next to the illustrious ancestress responsible for all subsequent greatness of the Pamphili family. Ashamed of the story that she had been buried in a furniture crate, the family prepared an elaborate coffin into which they would transfer her remains.

On Monday, March 30, on the occasion of digging in the Church of San Martino to inter the body of His Majesty, Signor Prince Don Girolamo, they had to remove the tombstone of Donna Olimpia, and under the headstone they found the cadaver of Donna Olimpia in a wooden box placed in a space surrounded by masonry which had been made under the tombstone. The cadaver consisted only of bones that were a bit consumed by time.

The dress was recognized as a ribbed silk, the color of crimson. A brass crucifix with an ebony cross, about as long as a palm, was placed on the chest, a crown of coconut palm threaded with red ribbon, two small medallions of silver and one of brass and a little Agnus Dei [a small wax lamb blessed by the pope]. Under the body was a cushion, but no one could tell what material it was made of.

All the hair was still on the skull, and part of it was a wiglet and part was woven into a part of the wiglet and another part

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braids, and wound by means of cardboard. You could recognize the well-done braids by their gold color and they are as pretty as can be. A new casket was made and was the same size as the planks of the old one that were underneath. She was placed in the new casket the same way she had been in the old one, along with all that was there without removing anything.
¹

It is fascinating that Olimpia was buried not in her traditional black widow’s weeds and peaked cap but in a gown of ribbed crimson silk, with golden false braids woven into her hair. It is possible that her servants had stolen all her gowns and Camillo hurriedly obtained clothing from someone else to place on Olimpia. It might have been Camillo’s last, bungling attempt to please his mother, tarting her up in a red dress and blond wig for her trip to meet God.

When news of Olimpia’s death reached the city, it aroused various reactions. Her relative and friend Cardinal Gualterio was devastated by the death of the woman who had single-handedly made him a cardinal. On October 9 he poured out his grief to a friend, Niccolò Caferri.

Donna Olimpia has died with no friends around her. I feel such great despair that I don’t know where I am. To vent this grief I have written two very long letters to my dear Signor Don Ca-millo. And he alone will be the object of my most obliging and heartfelt gratitude. If he cares for me as does Your Holiness, I ask you to please extend to him the kindest affection I have for that most Illustrious woman of, unfortunately, happy memory.

Oh my dear, dear signora, whom I can no longer serve. Now she has been lifted up and where is she? Oh the pain. God have compassion for that soul and give me the light of understanding from this lesson, as He has done in similar circumstances.

Gualterio then added the surprising news that Olimpia had made up her differences with the princess of Rossano.

I am consoled that her death occurred after having made peace with the Princess. . . . The goodness of God postponed the death of the mother until she made peace with the wife.

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I assure you that . . . the lady of the P.M.
[Pontifex Maximus?]
served well and diligently, and she never received any of the recognition she should have.
²

Many rejoiced at Olimpia’s demise. Gregorio Leti saw her death as God’s vengeance for her sins. He moralized, “But if men had abandoned chastisement of this woman, or if, better said, the pope had been forced to postpone it until a more convenient time, God, who watches constantly while men sleep, threw the powerful thunderbolt against the woman who was guilty of so many crimes.”
³

But if God had truly wanted to punish Olimpia, it would have been years earlier, certainly not after allowing her to run the Vatican for the better part of a decade, and certainly not at the ripe old age of sixty-six, which in the 1650s was more like eighty in our own times. At that age, a quick death after a few days of fever was not so much a punishment as a blessing.

Olimpia’s death sealed the triumph of her family. The pope was not inclined to punish innocent relatives, even though they had clearly profited from her corruption. The embezzler was dead, and it was far more dignified to let the matter rest. Moreover, having found the time to look carefully into the financial records of Urban VIII, the pope found that the Barberini family had stolen many times what the Pamphilis had pocketed. Some estimates indicate that Taddeo Barberini had pilfered 42 million scudi, while Cardinal Francesco reportedly stole 29 million, and Cardinal Antonio another 20 million. Whatever Olimpia had purloined, it was a drop in the bucket by comparison.

Therefore, if Alexander were to prosecute the Pamphilis, he would also have to prosecute the Barberinis, who now boasted three cardinals in top church positions. If he did that, he would have to look into the ill-gotten gains of other papal families—the Ludovisis, Borgheses, Al-dobrandinis, Perettis, and Buoncompagnis, just to mention a few. He could hardly prosecute
all
papal families for corruption and confiscate their wealth. If he did so, given the intricate marriage alliances, not a single noble line in Rome would be left unscathed. Moreover, he would have to prosecute himself, given the rampant nepotism he had begun to

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practice. Clearly it was in the best interests of the Holy Roman Church to drop the case against Olimpia’s heirs.

“As they say in Rome, dead dog, dead rabies,” Gregorio Leti wrote. “So that no one thought any more of her.”
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q

Camillo and the princess of Rossano enjoyed Olimpia’s wealth. They now owned two enormous palaces in Rome—the Palazzo Pamphili and the Palazzo Aldobrandini, which came in handy when the couple had a knock-down, drag-out fight and temporarily separated. Camillo lived principally in the Piazza Navona. His inheritance included not only Olimpia’s properties, furniture, and art collections but also the astonishing sum of two million gold pieces.

Camillo died in 1666 at the age of forty-four. It is not known exactly what killed him, though those who knew of the deplorable state of his marriage suspected that he had, in fact, been nagged to death. His wife, the princess of Rossano, died in 1681 at the age of fifty-eight, having connived to get their second son, Benedetto, made a cardinal.

The Church of Saint Agnes did eventually become the resting place for Innocent’s bones, but not until 1677, when Camillo’s son Gianbat-tista had them dug up from the shoddy grave in Saint Peter’s basement and transferred there. His funerary monument was not completed until 1729. It was placed above the main door, so that visitors rarely, if ever, notice it.