The Kings' Mistresses (30 page)

When the French won the battle of Namur, Saint-Evremond stubbornly refused to share in Hortense's satisfaction. Hortense's daughter Marie-Olympe had a husband fighting with the French. In August 1692 he was killed in the battle of Steenkerque. Hortense was corresponding with her London friends from Bath, where she was taking the waters to try to heal a leg injury from a fall. Saint-Evremond wrote to her that her salon habitués all had come together to bemoan the sad military news, and then finished by drinking cheerfully to her health: “We drank to your health thrice: we started with approval, from approval we went to praise, and from praise to admiration. As tenderness and pity are normally mixed with praise, while drinking we regretted the misfortune of your condition, and I had difficulty stopping all the murmuring against Providence for having made the daughter a widow, instead of the mother.”
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And so it went—the circle of friends sought above all to keep their pleasures alive during the difficult war years.

Political positions were hardening on both sides. In his advanced age, Louis XIV was increasingly intolerant of religious practices that were not Catholic. After he revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, thousands of Protestants had fled the country, causing France to lose precious resources and a significant portion of its educated population. In England, William of Orange, after the death of his
wife, Mary, in 1694, embraced a harder line in favor of the Protestants, as he strove to strengthen his hold over Parliament. When the Nine Years' War ended with the Treaty of Rijswijk in 1697, the English had won important concessions from Louis XIV, including his recognition of William as king, but it was a fragile peace, not destined to last for long.

Although the Duchess Mazarin watched her own financial and political support weaken, she nonetheless had the pleasure of realizing that her public image as both wronged wife and female libertine continued to fascinate. Although moralistic condemnation of the lifestyle she had embraced continued and even increased, the cause of unhappily married women, which she had come to symbolize, was aired more openly in the 1690s than ever before. Several prominent women brought divorce cases before the House of Lords, and forced or unhappy marriages were discussed and acted out on the stage in plays by female playwrights. Even writers who took a more conservative view of marriage, such as the philosopher Mary Astell, who lived down the street from Hortense in Chelsea, acknowledged that the Mazarin case illustrated circumstances that no wife should have to endure.

Marie had managed to remain informed of Hortense's life through the years, sometimes sporadically, but she knew her sister's fortunes were in decline. In a letter to Countess Ortensia Stella, she conveyed her sister's good wishes and reported on her difficult situation:

A series of letters by Saint-Evremond to the Duchess Mazarin and other friends provides the closest look at what her life had become by the spring of 1699, in the months leading up to her death. Her old friend was appalled to see her take so little care for her health, as she began to drink in amounts that even for him seemed excessive. He was terrified at the prospect of outliving his younger companion, who by then was fifty-three. She spoke to Saint-Evremond of taking a final “retreat” that might bring her “relief,” and he replied to her anxiously, trying to maintain the light tone that had been the foundation of both of their approaches to life in what is thought to be his last letter to her:

Was she grieving over a death, as the reference to Seneca might suggest? Was she unable to live with the inevitable signs of her own declining beauty? Or was she simply overwhelmed by the diminished state of her financial affairs, as the letter also indicates? When she refused company, it was clear to her friends that Hortense was depressed. By the beginning of June 1699 she was spending most of her time in solitude, drinking alarming quantities of her favorite eau-de-vie. By mid-June she was refusing to eat. Her behavior was not merely self-destructive; it had become suicidal. Saint-Evremond
would later write a poem about her death in which it is clear that he believed she had deliberately killed herself by drinking.

Throughout June a flurry of letters circulated warning that she was ill. Her sister Marianne set sail from France to join her, as did Hortense's son, Paul-Jules. The Paris gazettes reported the news: “Madame the Duchess of Bouillon has just taken leave of the king who has given her permission to go to England to see her sister”; “we hear from London that Madame Mazarin is dangerously ill. The Duke of Meilleraye, her son, has rushed to join her, saying to his friends that he was taking money to her, which she badly needed.” Meanwhile, Saint-Evremond persisted in his efforts to cheer his ailing friend and dissuade her from her sinister intent. But all was in vain. When Marianne arrived on the Dover coast, she was informed that her sister had died just days earlier, on July 2. Hortense's son had not arrived in time to speak with her. In her last days, she had refused all medical care and all visits, including that of a priest, and died, as one letter said, “without any manner of concern for what was past or what was to come.”
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Anyone arriving from France to claim her body could expect to confront her creditors. Marianne did not even disembark; her boat returned straightaway to France.

Saint-Evremond was inconsolable. “No one here speaks of Madame Mazarin's death without also speaking of your grief,” wrote one of his friends. His lifelong friend Ninon de l'Enclos wrote him long, consolatory letters full of praise for a woman she had come to know only through Saint-Evremond's descriptions:

Saint-Evremond was left without his dear companion, and also without the huge sums of money he had loaned her. After a few months he was able to reflect with his characteristic dry wit on the position in which he now found himself. His French friends were urging him to make the return voyage home to live out his remaining years, where the aging king would surely forgive him the reasons for his exile, long in the past, but he declined.

The question of the duchess's debts had in fact provoked a macabre final chapter in the story of her life's adventures. Almost as soon as Marianne's boat had landed on the coast of France, the Duke Mazarin decided to officially claim his wife's body and have her returned to him, once and for all. But he was hindered by a tangle of legal impediments. Several of Hortense's creditors (though not Saint-Evremond) had engaged lawyers to prevent the disposal of her body without due payment of her debts. As one news gazette reported, the body of the duchess was “arrested”: “Her body was first embalmed and it is thought that it will be sent to Paris to be
interred in the church of the College of Four Nations, where there is a beautiful mausoleum for Cardinal Mazarin, her uncle and founder of this college. A few days after her death an individual to whom she owed money had her corpse arrested.”
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Armand-Charles found himself in an absurd situation: having steadfastly refused for decades to send money to Hortense while she was alive, he now was being forced to pay her expenses after she was dead. Faced with this dilemma, and to the surprise of many, the miserly duke decided to pay, though he negotiated a reduced sum, while Lord Montagu and other friends of the duchess contributed additional amounts. The duke finally welcomed Hortense home two months after her death, when the coffin carrying her remains was returned to him.

The ensuing spectacle was even more astonishing and eccentric, as all who knew the Duke Mazarin had come to expect. As if carrying out his revenge on Hortense's defiant ability to travel where and when she pleased, he traveled with her corpse throughout northern France, to all the places where she had so hated accompanying him during their marriage. Slowly and ceremoniously he transported the casket to each of his provincial estates before finally, four months later, allowing himself to be persuaded to deposit the coffin in the small church of Notre Dame de Liesse, near one of his country chateaux. The church was a pilgrimage site, housing a statue of the Virgin brought back from the Holy Land during the crusades. For years, until the duke's death in 1713, Hortense Mancini's coffin became one of the relics before which pilgrims prayed. In 1714 it was transported for burial next to her husband and uncle in the College of Four Nations in Paris.

When Marie learned of her sister's death, she was still living in Madrid, having returned there after briefly attempting, for a few months after Lorenzo's death, to live once again in Rome in the family palazzo with her son Filippo and his family. But the ghosts were too present there, and she was not inclined to play the largely
invisible role of dowager princess. Still, she had been happy to find herself reunited with her sons. Carlo, the youngest, had come to Madrid immediately after his father's death to persuade her to return. His career was assured in the priesthood, with a likely advancement to cardinal. Marcantonio, too, had found success as a military officer. Marie's family was paying her a pension drawn on her dowry, which was adequate to give her the independence she had always craved. So she returned to Madrid, now free to make her own life there, and committed to serving her family's interests from afar, which she did with considerable energy. She maintained a regular correspondence with Filippo, offering advice on everything from household budgets to fashion to remedies for various health ailments. Filippo was patient, and satisfied to retain his connection with his mother, and indirectly with his Spanish in-laws, in this manner. When Filippo's wife, Laurencia, died, childless, in 1697, Marie supported his quick remarriage to young Olimpia Pamphili, daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Rome and niece of Pope Innocent VIII. The Colonna dynasty seemed assured.

Throughout these years Marie also maintained her close contact with Ortensia Stella. Filippo, perhaps not surprisingly, had been not particularly inclined to continue supporting his father's longtime mistress after Lorenzo died. It was Marie who urged him to treat her fairly, as indeed Lorenzo had requested in his will, where he also had officially recognized his paternity of two children by the Countess Stella. Ortensia had written her friend immediately after Lorenzo's death and Marie had responded, “I am more than persuaded of the sincerity of your affection and your feelings, having no doubt that you have as much interest as I in the loss that I have suffered, and that for the same reason it must be equally sensitive for you.”
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Surveying the consequences of Lorenzo's marital infidelities, Marie took a position that was not unlike that of many women of her time and social class. It was common to tolerate a
husband's infidelity with a person of a lower station. Marie had left her friend vulnerable to pressure from Lorenzo when she had first decided to flee with only a few servants to accompany her. There seems to have never even been a question that the Countess Stella would join her. Instead, the two women had helped each other acquire what they each needed from Lorenzo's household. In the 1690s Marie continued to receive through the mail her favorite perfumes, powders, gloves, fans, jasmine oil, and other cosmetics from the countess. Ortensia urged her to return to Rome, and Marie replied affectionately that her friend should join her in Genoa, that she still could not tolerate Rome: