The Kings' Mistresses (14 page)

The Duke Mazarin had made sure to target certain objects that reminded him the most of his estranged wife: an antique statue of a wounded Amazon, a painting of Diana and her nymphs by Francesco Albani, and another of the sleeping lovers Mars and Venus. Hortense would also later reflect that the public perceived her husband's attack as a jealous rage. “People jeered that he was even in love with the beautiful statues of the Palais Mazarin; and the love of that man truly must have brought bad luck, since those poor
statues have been so cruelly punished for it, just as I have, although they were no guiltier than I.”
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Dismembering the “nude” ancient statues with his hammer, throwing black paint over the naked flesh in paintings by the likes of Raphael, Correggio, Titian, da Vinci, and Giorgione, and slashing the giant tapestries with his knife, Armand-Charles worked tirelessly for an entire day. After supper he enlisted help from his servants and stopped only when exhaustion forced him to rest. The next day, a courier arrived from court carrying a royal order to desist, but the destruction had already been done. The king sent guards to the Mazarin palace. There was nothing left to do but survey, aghast, the damage wrought on what had been the greatest collection of art ever assembled in Europe. News of the crime quickly circulated and even took on lyrical form as artists and writers lamented the event in poems and pamphlets, imagining the statues imploring Louis XIV to “save the living marbles” and “tame the violence of an excessive zeal.”
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At his estate in Burgundy, the writer Roger de Rabutin, the Count of Bussy, received letters from his friends describing the excitement caused by the Paris events. Madame de Scudéry wrote him that the duke had been placed under house arrest: “Monsieur de Mazarin is imprisoned in his house for having broken or burned more than four hundred thousand francs worth of statues and paintings because they were nude. Monsieur Colbert, having discovered this fine intention before it was executed, had sent an order from the king to prevent it.”
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But it was too late.

Before leaving Italy, Hortense had written to Finance Minister Colbert expressing the terms she was hoping for in a settlement with her husband: she would be willing, she wrote, to live in a convent of her choice in Paris, where she could receive visitors at will; she wanted to be free to remain in Paris when her husband made his numerous official trips to the provinces; and she wished to choose her own servants. At the time, neither Colbert nor the king
had replied to her overtures, but now, as she learned of her husband's violent attack on the collection that the king considered a legacy to the nation, she realized that her own position might be viewed more sympathetically. The incident had certainly gained her allies and cemented the solidarity that many already felt for her rebellious choices. “The world has never seen a more deserving cuckold than the Duke Mazarin,” wrote the Count of Bussy, “and every day of his life adds new esteem to that which I had for his wife when she preferred to stay out in the street rather than see him any more.”
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As she was en route from Nevers, Hortense received the order to go to the Cistercian abbey Notre Dame du Lys, some forty miles southeast of Paris. This was a good sign. The place was a school and residence for young noblewomen under the protection of the Crown, and arrangements for her to reside there had been made personally by Colbert, whom she thanked profusely: “Truly, Sir, nothing is so obliging as what you have done for me. And I will behave in a manner such that my conduct will always be worthy of the grace you have shown me, as that is the only way I have to thank you.”
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The abbess of Lys was less enthusiastic about the arrangement. She discussed her concerns with the archbishop of Sens, recalling with alarm the stories they had heard about Hortense's escapades with her friend Marie-Sidonie de Courcelles when they both had been confined to a convent. So the two decided to spell out the conditions under which they would accept this new pensioner. The Duke Mazarin had rushed to send his own demands, which they also were trying to satisfy without offending Colbert or the king, as the prelate wrote in a letter to Colbert:

But their concerns proved unfounded once Hortense was established in her new surroundings. “We are most surprised to observe the conduct of Madame the Duchess Mazarin, after the impressions we had been given,” they wrote. “She must be extremely changed or else others serve her very ill, for one could not act better than she in all things. One hears no more noise than if she were not even in the house and she works and reads the books of piety that we give her, which she seems to enjoy.”
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During those cold winter months in the country abbey, the duchess was on good behavior. Meanwhile, she was being pressed by the duke, “who presented me with several proposals for accommodation, but all by miserable monks or other persons of similar substance, and all without any guarantees.”
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Philippe, newly married, sent petitions to the king on his sister's behalf. After two months of this the king decided to attempt his own intervention and summoned Hortense for an audience in the presence of Madame de Montespan, the king's mistress and aunt of Philippe's new wife. All of these comings and goings were watched with great interest. A carriage was sent to fetch the duchess and she was brought to court accompanied by a chaperone the king had chosen who was thought to be incorruptible, and eight armed guards. In her audience with Louis XIV, Hortense felt she received a respectful
and sympathetic hearing. Still, the king directed her to tell him exactly what she wanted: If it was to return to Italy, he promised to provide her with some support in the form of a pension of 24,000 francs. But he advised against it and urged her, as Hortense later reported, to stay with her husband. If she would stay, he promised to “make my agreement as advantageous as I desired, that I would not be compelled to follow Monsieur Mazarin on any journey, that he would have no say over my servants, even that if his caresses were odious to me, I would immediately be relieved of any obligation to suffer them, and that he was giving me until the next day to think it over.”
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Hortense's friends and acquaintances advised her to accept this offer of a mediated reconciliation, even as she contemplated another quick getaway. “What do you hope to do with your twenty-thousand francs?” one asked, while another commented that her perpetual need to flee her husband at any cost illustrated what happened when “we women have our brains fall to pieces.”
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But the thought of returning to a life in the company of the duke, even in separate wings of their residence, was unbearable to her. She did not believe that Armand-Charles could be contained. She wrote a letter to the king saying as much: “I replied the following day, . . . that I could not resolve myself to return to him, that no matter what precautions might be taken against his moody temperament, I would have to face twenty small acts of cruelty every day, about which it would not be fitting to trouble His Majesty.”
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As for her friend's skepticism regarding Hortense's ability to survive on the pension the king had offered, she reflected that in the three years since she had first left Paris, she had learned more than her friends there could understand. “But he did not know that I had learned to use money wisely. It is not that I was blind to the fact that I could not possibly live decently for very long with that sum; but . . . I calculated that it would at least give me the time to take other measures.”
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And so on February 24 the Duchess Mazarin once again left Paris, accompanied by her designated chaperone, Madame Bellinzani, who was to ensure that her charge be suitably restricted during the voyage and upon her arrival in Rome. As ever, Hortense's movements were observed, debated, and circulated for the entertainment of all those who were missing the news as it broke in Paris. Madame de Sévigné wrote delightedly to her daughter in Provence that Hortense left the capital echoing the voices of the Fronde rebels who had risen against her uncle the cardinal thirty years earlier, shouting, “No more Mazarin! No more Mazarin!” Madame de Scudéry wrote to the Count of Bussy in Burgundy describing the duchess as a madwoman, to which he replied, “Madame Mazarin is quite mad, I admit, but you must confess that Monsieur Mazarin is an idiot.”
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It would be the last time Hortense saw Paris. But she was optimistic and managed to direct the traveling party on an itinerary that took her through cities where she knew she had friends ready to receive and entertain her. The return trip to Rome took three months, including a long layover in Turin, where she was well received by the Duke of Savoy. Unlike her first trip to Rome three years earlier, she did not rush, she suffered no injuries, and when she finally reached her destination, at the end of May 1671, at the peak of the Roman springtime, her sister found her to be “more beautiful than ever.” Roman society had missed Hortense's presence. The
avvisi,
or handwritten newsletters, had reported that in her absence, social gatherings did not attract as many interesting people, and they lacked “that liberty that was only found in the company of the Constabless and the Duchess Mazarin, . . . that wit and graceful skill that reigns in the French ladies.”
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In March the newsletters were triumphant: “The Duke is greatly troubled by His Majesty having given permission to his Duchess to return and continually live in Rome. . . . Madame Colonna is hoping that she
will bring back some unusual new fashion, . . . and with her company give Rome the pleasure of that amusement that can only be found in their conversations.”
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Marie celebrated Hortense's arrival by resuming her “conversations” and salon gatherings at the Colonna palace.

While Hortense had been gone, in 1670 and 1671, the work on enlarging the art collection, decorating the palazzo, and supporting theatrical productions there moved ahead at an accelerated pace. When Hortense returned to Rome in 1671, Marie embraced every opportunity to leave the palazzo Colonna with her sister and move freely about the city. The Roman gazettes recorded the public fascination with these two sisters, who had introduced a “French liberty” to the lives of Roman women. The Duchess Mazarin's presence added to the animation of the Colonna palace as well as providing fodder for the ever-curious readers of the gazettes. Finishing touches were made to the trompe l'oeil frescoes covering the walls in Marie's salon, depicting a rural landscape that looked so real that one was tempted to walk through the wall and into the open countryside beyond the confines of the city. In the grand gallery linking the two main wings of the palace, the walls were covered with maps of the world in fresco, and the ceiling represented the star-filled skies so familiar to Marie from her studies of astrology. Voet continued his project of producing more portraits of both sisters, including one of the two together that shows Hortense holding out her palm to Marie, who points her finger toward the sky as if in warning as she reads her younger sister's fortune.

In the hot summer of 1671, Hortense joined Marie in swimming in the Tiber, scandalizing the Romans. Marie had started her swimming outings the year before, accompanied by an entourage of ladies, gentlemen, and servants who more than once had scooped her out of the strong currents to avert disaster. Philippe de Lorraine, a longtime friend of the Mancinis, was in Italy in that year with his
brother the Chevalier de Marsan. The Chevalier de Lorraine was a notorious bisexual whose intimacy with the king's brother was causing tensions in the royal family, and he had in effect been exiled to Rome. He and Marsan were quite happy to keep company with Hortense and Marie. Rumors abounded; it was said that Marsan became a lover of Hortense and Lorraine of Marie, who wrote:

Lorenzo Colonna, though, had become less inclined to enter into the risky spirit of his wife's cultural projects, and he was angered by some of her escapades with her sister. Their lives had become quite separate. Even conversation between them was stiff and distant, as Marie would later reflect, though they continued to attend public events together. He “barely even spoke to me, and if he did, it was in such a way as to make me prefer his silence to his words,” she wrote.
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By the time Philippe Mancini returned to Rome after a few months' absence, the tension between the Colonna couple was becoming alarming to Marie's friends, and she seemed afraid of her husband. During her illness in 1671 she had even become morbidly afraid that her husband wanted to do away with her. Philippe discussed with her Lorenzo's reputation for violence. He urged her to leave, warning that she might soon lose the liberty that was so
precious to her. Marie's excursions with the Chevalier de Lorraine had aroused her husband's jealousy, but his coldness left her uncertain about what measures he might have been contemplating. And Lorraine left Rome suddenly in January 1672, just when Marie was coming to rely on him for support and after she herself, as Hortense put it, “had quarreled with all of Rome for his sake.”
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Before leaving, Lorraine had presented Marie with a gift from the king's brother Philippe d'Orleans, a present that must have reminded her of the independent spirit she had long cherished in herself. It was a magnificent hunting outfit, “a hunting equipage worth a thousand pistoles, trimmed with loads of the richest and most beautiful ribbons from Paris.”
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Sitting in her salon, Marie contemplated the paths lacing the painted countryside covering the walls that enclosed her. She thought of the road her sister had chosen. She obsessively studied her astrological charts and confided her fears in Hortense, who could not help but feel a sense of alarm as she observed that “the same star that drew me to Italy was drawing her to France.”
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