The Kings' Mistresses (12 page)

The route was a difficult one, with little rest. Heading for the city of Nancy, capital of the independent duchy of Lorraine, Hortense traveled by private carriage, postal coach, open buggy, and then horseback, covering nearly 250 miles in less than two days. In
Nancy she was welcomed by the Duke of Lorraine at his ancestral palace, from which he governed. Hortense and Philippe had chosen this destination carefully; it was a border territory that still enjoyed political autonomy from France and for the time being was not challenged by Louis XIV's expansionist policies. Hortense's host was the elder Charles de Lorraine, who along with his nephew had unsuccessfully tried to betroth himself to Marie some eight years earlier. He was only too happy to provide shelter for Hortense, on the way to join her sister. There Hortense and Nanon were able to rest for several days, enjoying the long summer evenings in the duke's gardens. En route to Nancy they had maintained their disguises, dressed as men, like heroines of a romance novel, even in the inn where they had spent the night. To their dismay and amusement, the women had found that such disguises worked better in fiction than in reality, as Hortense wrote:

In Nancy, Charles de Lorraine dismissed the anxious warnings of the local representative of the French court, who argued that the runaways should be returned promptly to France. Instead the duke provided the party with twenty armed guards for their continued safety through Switzerland and the Alps. Proceeding on their way southeast toward Italy, they stopped only one night at an inn in Neuchâtel, then circled the edge of Lake Lucerne and arrived
in the town of Altdorf, high in the mountains at the opening of Saint Gotthard Pass. There they learned that travelers leaving Switzerland headed for the state of Milan were being quarantined, owing to the threat of plague. Hortense and her entourage settled in for what looked to be a long respite.

The group soon received word that Duke Mazarin was busy plotting to have his wife kidnapped and brought back to Paris. But Hortense was not convinced that such threats could be carried out, and in any case she was determined to continue on her path. Already, she knew, her decision meant she was even less likely to receive a favorable hearing from the Grand Chamber of judges, and the king appeared to be keeping his promise not to intervene. Besides, the farther she traveled, the more she felt free of her former identity, and was even attracted by the riskiness of her venture. She laughed off the fact that her disguise had fooled no one. On the other hand, in Neuchâtel she enjoyed the incongruous experience of being mistaken for Madame de Longueville, Duchess of Nemours. The Longueville family did in fact govern the city of Neuchâtel, but few of its citizens had ever seen the duchess. Hearing that a French duchess was in their city, they rushed to see her. “You would not believe the joy that these people showed me,” Hortense later wrote. “As they were not accustomed to seeing women of quality from France pass through their land, they could not understand how anyone other than Madame de Longueville might have business there.”
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In the beginning, at least, the traveling party's forced layover in Altdorf may have provided welcome rest for Hortense. She was in pain from a leg wound she had suffered in a fall in the Lorraine palace gardens and that had been aggravated by the voyage. Doctors were called and she was bled in an attempt to relieve the swelling, but to little avail. She worried that the infection would become gangrenous without constant care. And the care she was receiving
in “this barbarous country” was not what she could have counted on in Paris—earlier, when the group had asked for a surgeon to attend an ailing Narcisse, they were sent a farrier, who was accustomed to working with animals and “who set to work to draw blood with a veterinary lancet but missed,” causing poor Narcisse to bleed profusely from a large vein. The surgeon sent to treat Hortense was more competent, but after his visits she shut herself up in her small room and would not allow anyone but Nanon and Courbeville near her. The young squire was tireless in his attentions to her needs, spending long hours with her even after Nanon became fatigued. “I am still persuaded,” she later wrote, “that my leg would have had to be amputated without him.” The leg healed, and Courbeville was henceforth Hortense's favorite, to the consternation of her other servants. It soon became clear that his nights in Hortense's room had a new purpose. When Philippe set out to join the travelers, he became furious upon learning that his sister and Courbeville had become lovers.

Within a few days of arriving in Altdorf, the group had received an unwelcome visitor. Acting on counsel from Finance Minister Colbert, the Duke Mazarin had sent his own emissary, Monsieur de Louvière, in pursuit of his wife. Louvière informed Hortense that her husband was prepared to negotiate with her, provided that she would willingly return to him. Failing her agreement, he said, she faced forced repatriation. Hortense received him coldly and dismissed her husband's threats, stating that she would not answer until she had completed her voyage to Milan and could take counsel with her sister. She paid no attention to Louvière's lengthy questioning of her servants. In his report to the duke, he spared none of the details from these interviews and included two letters he had found in the Neuchâtel inn where she had stayed. Written by Hortense to her brother and to the Chevalier de Rohan, the letters left no doubt that Hortense had been plotting her escape for some
time, against the directives of both the king and the courts. The jealous duke further concluded that Rohan had been in love with his wife, and he declared publicly that his suspicions extended even to her brother, accusing them of incest.

Such a shocking accusation, had it come from the fanatical husband a few months earlier, would not have endeared him to the judges reviewing his legal dispute with his wife. Even immediately following her disappearance, public sympathy was more with the wife than with the husband. But before long, Duke Mazarin's diligence began to pay off, especially when Olympe, feeling betrayed by her sister's secret escape, agreed to lend her support to forcing Hortense's return. No one but the duke would repeat or support the incest accusation, but the king took a first step against Hortense by punishing Rohan, stripping him of his offices and thus plunging him into debt. Hortense could only express outrage, from a distance, at the turn of events and especially the “foul accusation” that her husband brought before the courts along with his “evidence,” consisting of poetry that Philippe had written in praise of his beautiful sister. Hortense later wrote:

But at this moment there was not much hope of finding a remedy favorable to the duchess. Her husband certainly was not disposed to negotiation, and Louis XIV showed no inclination to indulge his runaway subjects. Hortense turned her attention to pressing for a quick end to the quarantine that was keeping her from continuing to Milan. She soon received that permission. The little group set out for Italy, undaunted by the rigors of an Alpine crossing.

In the seventeenth century, the Saint Gotthard Pass was a busy trade route linking the Rhine Valley in the north, in what is now Germany, to the valleys and the Po River basin of northern Italy. But the pass was not much more than a long mountain path, winding between rocks, over rushing water, and along the edge of cliffs. It could accommodate foot travelers, horseback riders, and donkey carts, but not carriages. Stone bridges built in the sixteenth century enabled travelers to avoid the lethal rushing waters of the Reuss River, but accidents were frequent. The pass took a heavy toll on those who were brave enough or simply obliged to climb it as they crossed the Alps. But somehow Hortense and her party made it through without injury.

Marie later recalled the reunion with her sister, in a country house outside of Milan, after her own exhausting six-day voyage by postal chaise from Rome, in the company of her close friend Ortensia Stella and a grumbling Lorenzo Colonna, who had opposed making the trip. She was astonished by her sister's beauty and somewhat embarrassed by her own outmoded attire compared with Hortense's Parisian stylishness. Even in her exhausted and weakened state, Hortense managed to seem fashionable, dressed in the loose summer fashion that was just appearing in Paris. Roman women did not yet wear lace or ribbons in the casual abundance that was becoming so popular in France. In Italy women's clothing was cut more modestly, and lace was typically seen only in the collars that covered low necklines. In Milan, as Marie later wrote, her “French”
sister was greeted with great curiosity and enthusiasm: “People's eagerness to see Madame Mazarin was incredible. Most things do not really live up to one's expectations of them, or else when one gets in the habit of seeing them, their luster tends to wear off. This was not the case with my sister's beauty. It seemed even greater than people had imagined it to be, and they discovered new charms each time they saw her, which did not happen as often as they wished.”
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Lorenzo, however, was not thrilled by his sister-in-law's arrival. He had received letters from France warning him against receiving the fugitive duchess. And his wife, delighted by the excuse to leave Rome, a city she had always found stultifying compared with the northern city-states of Venice and Milan, not to mention Paris, was only too happy to prolong the Italian “reception” of Hortense for as long as possible. Philippe had joined his sisters, after having briefly left the traveling party when he discovered Hortense's relationship with Courbeville. When Lorenzo pressed for a quick return to Rome, Marie, Hortense, and Philippe—reunited for the first time in eight years—countered that a side trip to Venice was far preferable. Together they managed to persuade Lorenzo to accompany them for an extended stay in Venice, where they enjoyed theater, opera, and more social introductions for Hortense. When Lorenzo's insistence on departure finally won out, it was to go only as far as Sienna, where the travelers settled in for a fortnight, at the country estate of the Roman Cardinal Flavio Chigi, nephew of the pope. There, the women accompanied the men on hunting outings. Hortense had impressive success: Hortense was used to being flattered with comparisons of her beauty and power to Diana, goddess of the hunt. Both sisters were excellent riders and loved hunting. Even in Italy, where girls were kept more sequestered from young men, highly placed women were permitted to ride and hunt, and were often portrayed in official portraits wearing hunting attire, surrounded by their dogs, and holding guns.

By the time the traveling party resumed the return voyage to Rome, more than four months had passed since Hortense's initial departure from Paris. Tensions in the family group were growing, for several reasons. Lorenzo was not eager to continue to shelter the wayward Hortense in the Colonna palazzo. Pressure from French emissaries was increasing. The Duke Mazarin saw to it that his brother-in-law received copies of a steady stream of reports from informants in Rome regarding Hortense's behavior. To complicate matters, Hortense's intimacy with the young squire Courbeville was by now quite open, angering both Marie and Philippe, who demanded upon arriving in Rome that Courbeville be sent back to France. In her memoirs Hortense is frank about the confrontations that ensued. Her attachment to Courbeville had been born with her newfound freedom and she resisted the pressure to break off the affair, which she knew full well could only severely damage her chances of a favorable settlement in the legal dispute with her husband. But in the end Courbeville himself may have made it easier for her, for he behaved so outrageously toward his former employer the Chevalier of Rohan, accusing him, along with Hortense's brother, of attempting to poison him (which may have been true), that she ultimately had to agree to send him away. “The bad behavior of Courbeville,” she wrote, “the unpleasant sensation which this affair was causing in society, and my desire to be at peace finally made me resolve to part with him, not doubting that he would willingly release me from the promise that I had made him.”
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Nevertheless, the parting was not easy. In the courtyard of the palazzo Colonna, Courbeville refused to leave unless Hortense herself gave the order. Marie taunted him, daring him to try swaying Hortense again as he had in the past. Hortense recalled later that he declared that he respected no one but her, but in despair, and with Marie threatening that if he stayed in the courtyard any longer he would “find someone who wanted a word with him,” Courbeville
left the palazzo grounds. Distraught, the Duchess Mazarin followed, and fearing for his life she accompanied him to the house of her uncle Cardinal Francesco Maria Mancini, where he obtained temporary shelter. Hortense herself went to the home of an aunt who reluctantly took her in but kept her securely behind locked doors.