The Kings' Mistresses (29 page)

This went on for more than three months. Festivities celebrating the coming marriage of Filippo and the daughter of Medina Celi
were being held in the family residences while the mother of the groom remained locked in a cell, cold and hungry. Then suddenly Lorenzo sent a letter to the queen declaring that he would be satisfied if Marie were to return to Madrid and once again enter a convent, this time not as a pensioner but as a novice, where she must take her vows and commit to remaining for the rest of her life. He declared that he would follow suit and enter the Order of Malta as a monk, if the pope so desired. The prospect was preposterous. No one could think of two people less inclined toward religious life, and most thought that Marie would refuse, but she was so weak and her living conditions so deplorable that she agreed, then was made to wait until mid-February while Lorenzo argued over the details.

By March 1681, Marie had entered the novitiate of the convent of San Jeronimo in Madrid. Madame d'Aulnoy was present at the solemn ceremony and visited her friend often in subsequent months. In her
Memoirs of the Court of Spain,
she describes Marie's return to Madrid and her life in the convent:

Lorenzo remained in Madrid just long enough for the marriage of his son on April 20, 1681, a sumptuous affair conducted in the absence of Filippo's mother. The Madrid gazettes reported that “the young seigneur was much afflicted, for he loved her tenderly. The day after the wedding the new couple went to the convent and were greeted with demonstrations of tenderness and joy by this most excellent of mothers.”
²⁵
Lorenzo then returned with his family and entourage to Rome. It remained to be determined what steps he would take to fulfill his part of the bargain, to take vows in the Order of Malta. Early in the following year the gazettes announced that Lorenzo had received a papal dispensation permitting him to join the order without taking vows of chastity and poverty and without embarking on the requisite pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He had managed finally to orchestrate a separation that suited him.

For the next few years Marie remained in Madrid, living in the convent but perpetually postponing the moment she would be expected to move forward from novice to nun. It did not take her very long, after Lorenzo's departure, to draw more effectively on the strength of her contacts at court and her friendship with Queen Marie-Louise. She was able to see people, even take excursions by carriage outside the convent walls. A succession of
French ambassadors came to visit her in her chilly room at San Jeronimo: “when the Constabless took me to her room I thought I would freeze to death,” wrote Madame d'Aulnoy, “it was really nothing but an attic.”
²⁶
The papal nuncio Mellini was sympathetic, instructing the nuns to be lenient with Marie, and responding to letters from Rome inquiring about when she was going to take her vows, saying that it would be a sin for her to do so until she was ready. She was allowed to receive presents, blankets, shawls, and embroidered clothing that she wore under a habit that she kept only loosely covering her shoulders. She recovered her lost gaiety and began to enjoy amusing her visitors and friends. She acquired a little spaniel, adorned with bracelets, collar, and even earrings all made of gold. Even King Carlos, who seemed powerless to arrange her release, was envious and immediately declared that he wanted a dog just like hers.

Lorenzo was occupied in Rome with other concerns, so he did not give his usual attention to the reports he was receiving from Madrid. He had not returned to Rome with his wife, but the palazzo Colonna did have a new mistress in the person of Filippo's bride, Laurencia, and the couple began to make their residence a centerpiece of Roman society comparable to what it had been under Marie and Lorenzo. The theater that had been constructed while Marie lived there was restored and once again became the site of concerts, operas, and plays. But Lorenzo struggled to resume his former supreme status among Roman nobility; he was no longer consistently invited to lead the cavalcade in the annual
chinea
. He no longer seemed to be held in high favor by Pope Innocent XI, who was perhaps impatient with Lorenzo's history of demands regarding his broken conjugal life. He spent increasingly longer periods on his country estates. When in 1687 he wrote to Cardinal Cibo, secretary to the pope, to press once again for Marie's return to Rome, Cibo addressed a perfunctory letter to the nuncio in
Madrid but Mellini's response indicated how weakened Lorenzo's position had become. “Nothing can diminish the aversion that she feels toward her husband's home,” he wrote. “Furthermore, if anyone should solicit His Majesty to put Madame in that fortress again, I think it would be a request that would never be granted, because the queen is entirely on her side and would never permit that such violence would be used on her again.”
²⁷
The result was quite the opposite of what Lorenzo had wished for: Marie was moved to more comfortable lodgings with the Order of Calatrava in Madrid, where she enjoyed the freedom to enter and exit as she wished.

Late in 1688, Lorenzo found himself grief-stricken by the sudden death of a close friend, and he could not manage to recover from his sadness and shock. He called for priests to attend to him as he contemplated his own mortality. He began to follow daily exercises of piety, going out into the streets to give money to the poor and instructing his confessor to provide funds and shelter to prostitutes if they would promise to reform their errant ways. He felt his own health declining, even when told that his symptoms were not serious, and he became increasingly preoccupied with what his confessor described as “the violence and disorder of his past life.”
²⁸
By March his illness was taken seriously by everyone. His sons and sisters gathered in the palazzo, where Lorenzo addressed each of them, giving his blessing to his children and urging them to reform their faults and not imitate their father. One of the priests asked him to say something about his wife, and as the confessor recounted in a report prepared later,

It was perhaps this letter from Lorenzo, given to their son to transmit to her, that inspired in Marie the grief that she expressed when she learned of her husband's death in April 1689. The international gazettes were filled with reports of the event coupled with accounts of Marie's reaction to the death and reminders of her travels and her husband's mistreatment of her. The French
Mercure historique et politique
reported that

In her private letters to Filippo and to Ortensia Stella, Marie expressed genuine sadness and certainly more grief than Lorenzo's sister, who could only comment that her brother “had lived like an assassin and a hedonist.”
³¹

Lorenzo's death must have seemed to the Duke Mazarin one more indication that the time was ripe for him to make one final desperate attempt to force his own wife to return to him. He had followed closely all of the tactics Lorenzo employed, and noted their failures. When he wrote to Mary Beatrice of Modena to declare his own intention to bring a legal case against Hortense, he seemed to be passing judgment on the strategies to which Lorenzo had resorted. He was not interested in committing his wife to a convent,
where he feared she would be allowed visitors and salon-style conversations. He wanted her returned to his personal supervision. By the end of the year Armand-Charles had been vindicated by the courts. But like Lorenzo, he would find that only death would bring a definitive resolution to the battle he had been waging.

—Marie Mancini,
The Truth in Its Own Light

 

 

 

 

T
HE DECISION OF THE Grand Council court in Paris had been in favor of the Duke Mazarin, but the duchess refused to obey the order to return to France. She remained in London, close to the court of William and Mary, though not in favor there, and she no longer had access to the apartment at Whitehall. To her friends, she expressed no regret over being excluded from the new elite society surrounding the king and queen, which everyone said was anything but animated. William suffered from asthma, which seemed to be aggravated by the damp palace air. Almost immediately after arriving in London in 1689, the royal couple commissioned Christopher Wren to expand the buildings of Kensington palace to make it a more suitable residence for them, and the court was transferred there at the end of that same year. When fire broke out and destroyed much of Whitehall palace in 1698,
William was quite content to know that he never would have to return to that chilly and damp residence along the banks of the Thames. The Duchess Mazarin moved her own residence to 15 Kensington Square sometime in 1690. It was a smaller house than her “little palace” in Saint James's Park but was located in a rapidly growing and fashionable district just down the street from the new royal palace. She maintained this residence for a time as her lodging close to the court but sometime in 1693 acquired another, more modest home on Paradise Row in Chelsea, where she spent an increasing amount of time in the years that followed. It was an effort to economize, bemoaned by Saint-Evremond and others who found the neighborhood isolated and entirely too far from the hustle and bustle of the city. Hortense dismissed their worries and held to her habitual lifestyle, continuing to host regular social gatherings in her new home and making her own way about the city without concern for the dangers of returning home alone late at night. She held chamber concerts, some of them short operas with such titles as
The Chelsea Concert
and
The Basset Scene
, that played out on stage the conversations, music, and gambling for which her gatherings continued to be well known.

During this time, France and England were at war, and would remain so until 1697. Within London, many friendships of long standing were broken and new alliances formed. Hortense was accustomed to loyalty in her friendships. If she had survived different regimes and cultural environments in the years since fleeing from Paris, it was not because she knew how to cynically manipulate different political interests. Her feelings were never hard to read, and she had pursued her pleasures openly, confronted her enemies, and held fast to her friends. Saint-Evremond had little luck persuading her to pay court to the new figures in power and to forget those who had fallen from it. You must do as I do, said the old exile: “I always have an unwavering attachment to the present government
of the country in which I reside.” Hortense laughed at him, but their friendship withstood these rough years. They saw each other almost daily, and wrote letters when they were apart. He sent her his favorite books and they continued to discuss the ones they both enjoyed—
Don Quixote,
and historical tales of the loves of Henry IV—and he persisted in his affectionate mockery of her stubborn fondness for pastoral romance. She became annoyed with him for producing verse praising only the English victories in the war, and he replied that the French victories did not inspire him.