The Kings' Mistresses (9 page)

By the end of May, Hortense had made her decision. The plan was hatched in the greatest secrecy, with only a handful of people who were close to her. She contacted her sister Marie in Rome and asked that she rendezvous with her in Milan. With their brother, Philippe, their loyal friend the Chevalier de Rohan, and Hortense's servant Nanon, she plotted a risky escape to Italy, outside the jurisdiction of husband, court, and king. She informed none of her other siblings, even Olympe, the Countess of Soissons, who had been sheltering her and helping to build her legal case. Hortense's children were to be left behind. In her memoirs, Hortense says she was persuaded that if she could manage to negotiate with her husband from outside the reach of the French legal system, he would be forced to give her a more favorable settlement.

Philippe encouraged this plan. But most of her other allies, including Olympe, would have opposed it. In the last days of May, the countess had become alarmed by her sister's distracted demeanor. She scolded Hortense for not focusing on her lawsuit and was angry when she one day arrived in Hortense's rooms to find her still lounging about in her dishabille, strumming on her guitar, when she should have been busy consulting with her lawyers. Hortense would later remember her own behavior then as a strategy, and a fragile one at that:

Was she secretly hoping that someone would prevent her from taking this rash step? The possible consequences could not have been more uncertain. Writing her memoirs seven years later, she remembered every detail of the preparations she was making in those last days before fleeing. The date of her departure is the only one in her life that she specifies in the memoirs. It was a fateful day for her, and one that would send her down a path that had not, she knew well, been explored by other women before her. She knew, too, that the king, the one person who had the power to either force her to remain with her husband or allow her to leave, had committed to stay out of her affairs, and in doing so had essentially left her to assume, on her own, whatever risks she chose to take. When, at three A.M. on June 14, 1668, Monsieur Mazarin rushed to the Louvre to have the king awakened, Louis XIV already knew she had left. His response to the duke was clear and, for Hortense, “generous”: “The king had the generosity to reply to him
that he wanted to keep the promise he had made to no longer involve himself in our affairs . . . and that it did not seem likely that I could be caught, given the head start I had and the advance preparations I had made.
”
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The Duchess Mazarin's adventures on the road had begun.

—Jacques de Belbeuf,
Travel Journal

 

 

 

 

W
HILE HER SISTER IN PARIS was arriving at the decision to flee both the capital and her husband, Marie Mancini Colonna had become well established in her native Rome as a member of one of that city's most prominent families. In June 1668, while Hortense was preparing her escape, Marie was helping her own husband prepare for an annual social ritual that preoccupied him obsessively: the
chinea
, a ceremonial cavalcade of Roman noblemen. Every June on the feast of Saint Peter, Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, Grand Constable of the Kingdom of Naples, Prince and Duke of Paliano, Prince of Castiglione, Duke of Tagliacozzo and of Marino, would gallop on horseback from the Corso to the Vatican, where he and the other Roman princes would present
a tribute of gold coins from the Kingdom of Naples to the pope. In June 1661, when Marie, newly wed, had lain gravely ill on a bed in Bologna, Lorenzo had insisted that she be carried by carriage to Rome rather than wait for her recovery, so that he would not miss this yearly opportunity to put his power and prestige on display.

Since her marriage by proxy, in the king's chapel in the Louvre, to Lorenzo Colonna in April 1661, Marie Mancini's life had been radically transformed. For her, the move to Rome was clearly an exile, from her family, her happy youth at the court of France, and from her fairy-tale romance with the young king that had so abruptly ended. In the months leading up to her wedding, as she waited for letters from Rome confirming the marriage contract, she had occasion to regret having agreed to it so quickly. She wrote to Cardinal Mazarin, “I am obliged to tell you that I will not possibly be happy in Rome, and I may even make unhappy the man who would marry me, for it would be impossible for me to become accustomed to the way of life in that country.”
¹
This was a notion she might easily have developed from talking to French travelers returning from that city, who reported that Italian women were expected to stay in their houses and go about in public only in the company of brothers, fathers, or husbands. In his treatise on the equality of the sexes, François Poullain de la Barre had described France as a country where women were far better off than in most parts of the world. “There are even some places,” he wrote, “where women are treated like slaves. In China their feet are bound during childhood to stop them leaving the house, where they see virtually only their husbands and their children. They are also shut in in Turkey. They are not much better off in Italy.”
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In August 1660 one of Lorenzo Colonna's emissaries in Paris wrote to him that Marie was finally getting over the idea that “women are like slaves” in Rome. When she finally left for Italy, her voyage was made more difficult by an illness she contracted en
route, and by her new husband's impatience to consummate the marriage immediately after meeting her for the first time at their rendezvous point in Turin, without regard for her physical and emotional exhaustion. She arrived in Rome seriously ill but managed to survive the elaborate formal presentations arranged for her there. For the rest of her life she frequently would associate Rome with illness, complaining of the bad air and poor sanitation compared with Paris.

Rome in 1661 was a city in the throes of architectural and urban development. As Marie traversed the city from the north, she reflected on how much it had changed since her departure just seven years earlier. The new pope, Fabio Chigi, who had assumed the name Alexander VII, had ambitious plans to redesign the city, build new churches, and impose a more modern urban landscape onto a city whose people had suffered from malaria and economic decline since the beginning of the century. In 1656, with a new outbreak of bubonic plague in Rome, the pope had instituted sanitation measures to contain the spread of the disease. Almost as soon as Alexander's pontificate began, it was clear that he intended to spend a considerable portion of the Catholic Church's resources on roads, waterworks, buildings, and architectural projects. He was helped in the latter two goals by the incomparable genius of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose many commissions of monuments, fountains, churches, and sculpture would continue to transform the city until the latter's death in 1680.

Marie had married into a family whose noble credentials extended back before the year 1000. The family even claimed ancestry dating to the era of Julius Caesar. Their prominence was anchored, as was that of all Roman nobility, in military exploits and in the Church—five popes had been Colonnas. Lorenzo's great-great-grandfather Marcantonio Colonna was the most famous Roman military hero since antiquity, having led a coalition of Christian states against the
Turks in the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, which decisively halted the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe. The city of Rome was dotted with statues and monuments commemorating this achievement, reminding anyone who walked through its streets of the debt Rome owed to the Colonna dynasty. One of them, a statue of Marcantonio Colonna in antique garb, continues to preside over the garden behind the family palazzo today. The ceiling of the Grand Gallery of the Palazzo is still covered with frescoes commemorating the great battle, and numerous giant seascape oil paintings depict the historic victory. Lorenzo Colonna's rank as constable designated him as a military commander in the family tradition.

On June 30, 1661, Marie, weak from her illness, was carried into her new home, where she was placed in her room on the ground floor, cooled by a small fountain and darkened to keep out the summer heat. There she prepared to meet the flood of curious visitors who would come to pay their respects to the newlyweds. If she had doubted it before, she could have no more uncertainties about the prestige of the family she had married into. Lorenzo's uncle the Cardinal Colonna was one of the first to arrive, bearing expensive gifts of jewels and money. Marie observed this parade with her characteristic curiosity, remarking on the styles of dress of the Roman women and the particular protocols surrounding any interaction with the pope and his relatives. Letters from the Italian abbé Elpidio Benedetti, formerly an agent of Cardinal Mazarin and whom Louis XIV had engaged to report on Marie's trip to Rome and her reception there, describe the lavish entertainments designed to amuse her because, he wrote, “we were trying to make Madame forget the gallant fetes at Fontainebleau and the pleasures of her beloved country.”
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As she recovered, she soon appreciated the efforts her husband was making to ease her entry into Roman society:

Lorenzo Colonna was extremely pleased with his young wife. She was a showpiece for him, a new and exotic conquest, very gratifying for a man famous for the obsessive pride with which he held his family name. Visitors who came to the palazzo to call on the new Constabless Colonna were also expected to make obsequious demonstrations of loyalty and respect to the family patriarch. Lorenzo was known for insisting on such displays. Just before Marie's voyage to Rome he had challenged a minor nobleman to a duel for not having addressed him as “your excellency.” Marie represented, too, a strengthening of Colonna's links to the French throne. Once she had arrived safely, Colonna wrote to Louis XIV, taking care to express his generous feelings toward the king's past “friendship” with Marie. Louis made a polite response, addressing Lorenzo as his “cousin” (Louis had often referred to Mazarin as his uncle), and expressing his own good wishes for the couple. It was a message in which much was left unsaid but also much was understood, in which Marie's recovering body seemed to have become the sign of a strengthened tie that would hold the two men together in the future.

Immediately upon their arrival in Rome, Lorenzo made it clear that he would not keep his new wife, or his own admiration for her, to himself. Proud of his family status and eager to display his wealth and power, he reveled in the public celebrations that normally accompanied the marriage of a great nobleman. He delighted, too, in impressing his French wife with the grandeur of her new residence, which in fact was unmatched by any private residence of the time in Paris, save perhaps the Mazarin palace. And he wanted to impress Marie, familiar with the court spectacles of Fontainebleau and the Louvre, with the wonders that could be orchestrated in the grand squares of Rome. As a surprise for her and a public display for the Romans, he commissioned Bernini to design an elaborate nighttime seascape in the Piazza Navona, which was flooded so that pleasure boats could float across the square, perfectly outlined by grand building facades. On this night, their windows were hung with richly brocaded banners with the initials “MMC” embroidered in gold. Stepping into a boat decked with flowers, Marie was surrounded by musicians. The concert that followed was punctuated by fireworks that lit up the night sky. Benedetti wrote to Paris describing the event, adding that “she seems to take pleasure in [the fetes], but she says that to enjoy them she must forget what is in her heart! Her gracious manner leads her to courteously receive all of these diversions, but she is much more gay when she has received letters from France.”
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