The Kings' Mistresses (2 page)

Throughout the first decade of the French regency, England was engaged in a period of bloody civil strife. While the rest of Europe moved toward a more peaceable end to their conflicts, King Charles I was publicly beheaded in London on January 30, 1649. The event sent shock waves through all of the neighboring royal courts. Louis XIV was just ten years old, but a pamphlet condemning the English for “committing the most barbarous assassination upon his sacred person,” their king, was distributed in the name of the king of France.
¹
France received and gave protection to the
widow of Charles I, Henrietta Maria, who was an aunt of Louis XIV, and her children. The dead king's family would remain in exile for the next eleven years, living at the palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Many English royalists fled to the Continent and lived in France during the commonwealth that had replaced the Stuart monarchy. The diaries and letters of these travelers record their fascination with the glittering sophistication of elite life surrounding the young King Louis XIV and his court. In England, under the Puritan commonwealth, theater and most other forms of public entertainment were forbidden. The French court was a dramatic contrast. During the first phase of the personal reign of the Sun King, spectacle, theater, and art were glorified and supported by the state, especially if made to aggrandize the king. Even the practice of kingship was cultivated by Louis both as his destiny and as an artistic performance. “What other pleasure should we not abandon for it,” he remarked. “The calling of a king is grand, noble, and delightful.”
²
In the capital city, salons such as those hosted by the famous novelist Madeleine de Scudéry received a diverse company of artists, writers, nobles, and wealthy bourgeois aspiring to the life of the elite. French writers were quickly translated, publications carrying the news of the day were widely disseminated, and these popular publications contributed to the fashionable new image of French styles of living that would be imitated by high society in England, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

By the time Charles II returned the Stuarts to the English throne in 1660, the cultural life of the French elite, as well as the architecture and design of court palaces and grand Paris residences, had become a model to be followed. London was soon after ravaged by an outbreak of plague in 1665, and further decimated by a fire that destroyed most of the city in 1666. Architects and city planners turned to Paris for inspiration as to how to rebuild the city and improve the design of its streets and public spaces. In the first decade
of Louis XIV's personal reign, Paris was already being called the City of Light, in reference to a new system of public lighting that had placed uniformed torch- and lantern-bearers on the city's busiest streets. By 1668, thousands of glass lanterns had been permanently installed all over the streets of the capital city, making it possible for merchants to remain open after dark and for Parisians, both men and women, to safely traverse the city as they pleased, day or night. Louis XIV remarked that the city lights “made his reign glitter.”
³
The general impression left on foreign visitors to Paris was of a vibrant and exciting modern city, one to be emulated and to which visitors inevitably were drawn to return. In 1665, architect Christopher Wren wrote enthusiastically of his visits to Paris, during which he observed massive building projects including the expansion of the Louvre, where “no less than a thousand hands are constantly employed in the works; some in laying mighty foundations, some in raising the stories, columns, entablements, etc. with vast stones, by great and useful engines; others in carving, inlaying of marbles, plastering, painting, gilding, etc., which altogether make a school of architecture, the best probably, at this day in Europe.”
⁴

The European states that had for so long been in conflict with the French found themselves in a progressively weakened position. France's political influence expanded and infiltrated other capital cities and foreign courts. In Italy, family dynasties that had held power for centuries were in decline. Florence was no longer the cultural center of the Continent. The Medici rulers had been unable to reverse an impending state bankruptcy. In a desperate attempt to prevent the flight of wealth and population, they passed laws restricting travel and banning the education of citizens outside of Tuscany. Grand Duke Cosimo III's marriage to Marie-Louise d'Orléans, cousin to Louis XIV, was an attempt to buttress the prestige of the declining Medici family. But the marriage had the opposite effect, for the grand duchess found her husband's degenerate
and tyrannical behavior to be unbearable. She fled back to France. By the early eighteenth century the Medici family was extinct and Tuscany was ruled by the Franco-Austrian duchy of Lorraine.

Elsewhere in Italy, the popes who governed baroque Rome were politically weakened by the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia, so they focused their attention on redesigning the city. Rome and Paris vied for the services of the great Italian sculptors, architects, and artists of the era: Bernini, Borromini, Pietro da Cortona. The French tightened their links with Rome through political marriages and a carefully chosen succession of ambassadors who established a vital presence for the French community in Rome. Travel between France and Italy was eased by improved roads and strengthened efforts to police them. Soon France was attracting the best of Italy's craftsmen and artists, who were drawn by economic opportunity as well as relative freedom from censorship in the first decades of Louis XIV's reign. Even the republic of Venice, traditionally so protective of its tradesmen and artists, began to lose its monopoly on luxury goods to France. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the French minister of trade and finance, negotiated a generous agreement with a group of Venetian glassblowers and installed them in the center of Paris. Louis XIV paid them a ceremonial visit and solemnly presented a generous purse to reward them for their defection and to subsidize their training of French craftsmen in the art of glass- and mirror-making. It was a cultural and economic coup on par with a military victory. The Venetian ambassador reported home that the spectacle had reduced him to tears. By the time the new palace of Versailles was under construction in the 1670s, imports of luxury goods from Venice were banned and the newly established glassworks in Paris was producing ornaments and mirrors to decorate the halls of the royal residence and the homes of the wealthy in France and abroad.

The rise of the French in the military, cultural, and political arenas of Europe was accompanied by the demise of the other great
nations. By midcentury Spain was no longer the world's foremost power. In 1600, at the height of the age of exploration, Spain had ruled the seas and large parts of Europe, its far-flung empire reaching from the Mediterranean to Africa. By 1659, when the Peace of the Pyrenees finally put an end to the long wars between Spain and France, the Spanish Hapsburg states had been battered by a series of bankruptcies, military defeats, internal rebellions, and epidemics of disease. An outbreak of bubonic plague spread throughout the Spanish Mediterranean encompassing most of southern Italy, killing more than half a million people. There was a shortage of silver, and money to raise armies was not to be had. Even if the funds could have been found, there were no longer enough men available to be conscripted. After Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, conducted a brief war with Spain that resulted in a treaty ceding the Spanish city of Dunkirk to England, the fearsome privateers and pirates based in that city who had long contracted with Spain to protect Spanish ships were no longer working for the Hapsburgs.

French travelers and diplomats began to take up residence in Madrid following the marriage of Louis XIV to the Spanish infanta and the end of armed conflict between the two countries. But life at the Spanish court held little appeal for them, compared with the courts of Paris and Versailles. Madrid was the capital of the Inquisition. Pierre de Villars, the French ambassador, wrote that the preferred state spectacles were public burnings of heretics on a huge stage erected in the Plaza Major. The English traveler Francis Willoughby wrote home in 1664 that Spain was intellectually backward, and appeared untouched by advances in the sciences and other areas of learning, with universities that resembled English institutions of the previous century. The writer Madame d'Aulnoy published accounts of her voyage to Madrid in which she described the extraordinarily constrained lives of Spanish noblewomen compared with the French. By midcentury, for cultivated young women
throughout Europe, it was France—especially Paris—that held a special fascination. Stories of salon gatherings led by ladies presiding over a mixed company of men and women found their way to London and the capitals on the Continent.

Over the decades following the Peace of the Pyrenees, Louis XIV followed the program of consolidating and centralizing authority that had been laid out by Richelieu, prime minister to Louis XIII, and continued under Cardinal Mazarin. The Sun King's overriding ambition, to increase the power and glory of France, led him also to pursue an expansionist military policy that was largely successful. The French army was reorganized and strengthened under the direction of François Michel Le Tellier de Louvois, the minister of war. Modern systems for storing and distributing supplies meant that soldiers on the move no longer depended on foraging and looting for food and ammunition. The efficiency and discipline of the French armies led them to a series of victories that progressively pushed the borders of France farther to the east and southwest. To defend its coastal borders, France bought Dunkirk from Charles II in 1662. Dunkirk was known for its shipbuilders and privateers who sold their services to nations seeking to protect their own merchant fleets on the high seas. This often meant aggressive maneuvers against the ships of competing nation-states. For the next fifty years, mercenary vessels operating from the strategic port city and working for the French attacked Dutch trade ships in the North Sea and the Atlantic.

Within France, Louis XIV worked tirelessly to build a strong centralized state and make the French nation a global cultural center. The French court continued to draw to it the best of Europe's craftsmen, artists, architects, and engineers. Each military victory was followed by days of festivities, fireworks, and elaborate spectacle at the royal residences of Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and Versailles. For the French elite, proximity to Versailles and Paris became the only route to prestige and advancement. To be excluded
from the king's presence became a nobleman's nightmare. As Stendhal would later observe, “The masterpiece of Louis XIV was his creation of the ennui of exile.” But by the end of the seventeenth century exile was a familiar experience for many Frenchmen and women from all walks of life. “Un roi, un loi, une foi”—one king, one law, one faith—became the motto of the reign, and dissenters were not tolerated. After the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685, thousands of Protestants fled the country, causing France to lose precious resources and a significant portion of its educated population.

The final decades of Louis XIV's long reign were marked by renewed warring between France and Spain and redoubled efforts by England and the European states to undermine France's dominant position. After England's Catholic King James II was deposed in 1688 and William and Mary took the throne, the English were at war with France both at home and abroad in the North American colonies. It was not until 1713 that a treaty was signed, ending France's battles with the “Grand Alliance” that had been formed to thwart French expansion under Louis XIV. In that year, when the French king was seventy-five years old, the final treaty begun by the Peace of Utrecht was signed. It brought to a close the bloody wars between France and Spain over the Spanish succession, curbed French expansion, and would mark the beginning of the long rise of the British Empire. Now near the end of his reign, with his armies and his population battered, Louis XIV agreed to raze the fortifications of Dunkirk and ceded French claims to the Netherlands, Savoy, Portugal, Prussia, and the Hudson's Bay Company territory in Canada. The royal treasury was almost bankrupt. The wars that had succeeded in expanding the French territories and securing a Bourbon prince as heir to the Spanish throne had been costly. The French armies had successfully fought off a series of European attempts to thwart their king's ambitions, but eventually Spain, England, Holland, and the German states had managed to form an
alliance that could contain him. On September 1, 1715, Louis XIV died of a gangrenous infection. It was the end of a fifty-five-year personal reign, the longest in Europe's history at the time.

The lives of Hortense and Marie Mancini spanned seven decades of these volatile changes to Europe's political and cultural territory. The two sisters traversed this landscape with a determination and intrepid spirit that was astonishing to those who followed the complicated route on which their adventures took them. At different points, they lived or moved through all of Europe's principal cultural capitals. They first arrived in Paris from Rome in 1654, as young girls. Their presence soon left an indelible mark on the young king of France, as he approached the age of majority, when he would officially assume personal control of the French state. Their intimacy with him, and their acts of rebellion, inspired the ways in which his own coming to adulthood would be viewed by others as myth, renunciation, and heroic endeavor. Although the Italian sisters ultimately would live most of their lives outside the borders of France, they always viewed themselves as moving in the orbit of the French throne. Like many of their contemporaries, they regarded the French court as the center of the universe. But it was not their fate to remain there for long.