The Kings' Mistresses (15 page)

—Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna to Louis XIV, June 21, 1672

—Cardinal Altieri to the papal envoy in Paris, August 20, 1672

 

 

 

 

T
HE PRECISE REASONS for Marie's decision to flee Rome on May 29, 1672, will never be completely understood. In her memoirs and letters she alludes to fears for her health, her liberty, and her life. Her brother, Philippe, had been
more blunt, warning her that “one day when I least expected it I would find myself locked up in Paliano, which is a fortress belonging to the constable.”
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Marie knew that her husband wanted her out of the way. He barely spoke to her and openly kept mistresses. In her final years in Rome, Marie was deeply preoccupied with astrology and even composed two astrological almanacs for the years 1670 and 1671, which she published under her own name. In letters to her friend the Countess Ortensia Stella, she alluded to “the fear that you know,” and in a letter to her husband after her departure she made similarly mysterious statements about a “suspicion” that made her leave and that had turned the talk in Rome against him.
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It seems clear that she feared for her life. Friends thought she was afraid her husband would try to poison her. Her sister Hortense wrote Lorenzo denying any involvement in pushing Marie to make the same risky choice she had made, and in that letter she, too, alluded to a dark fear that spurred her sister on, though she tried to make light of it: “Please believe that I would never forgive myself if by caprice or by carelessness I had cleared the path for my sister to distance herself from you. Terror, or what I think was panic, based on counsel indiscreetly given and repeated many times, were the only counselors of this disappearance.”
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It would not have been the first time in Marie's world that a jealous nobleman killed his wife and got away with it. In 1667 the young Diane-Elisabeth de Rossan, Marquise de Ganges, had been murdered on orders of her husband, and although the assassins had been convicted of the crime, the marquis himself had gone unpunished. The victim had frequented Roman society and was a favorite of Queen Christina of Sweden; by 1670, the case was already a cause célèbre. And Lorenzo Colonna was known to have a violent temperament. He was famous for flying into rages when he felt slighted. He was thought to have been responsible for “a few assassinations,” as the French ambassador wrote of him when he died.

Marie and Hortense had become very close in the year since the duchess had returned to Rome. Marie envied her sister's courage and confided her own fears about what Lorenzo's coldness toward her, and jealousy, might lead him to do. Noting Hortense's sympathy, Marie later wrote that she “implored her not to return to France without bringing me.”
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Hortense acknowledged her sister's anxieties but tried unsuccessfully to dissuade her from taking the same steps she had taken. Marie pointed to Lorenzo's rages. She assured her sister that she could not know the dangerous extent to which jealousy and hatred between Roman families could lead, and she feared what might become of both of them if they became isolated in Rome, “where dissimulation and hatred among the families reign more supreme than among other courts.”
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But Hortense saw that in Marie's heart the choice had already been made. “And so,” Marie recounted, “I set out on the twenty-ninth of May, carrying no more on my person than 700 pistoles, my pearls, and some diamond pendants, and Madame Mazarin having lost all her clothes and effects by leaving them in Rome.”
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Pretending to set out on a day outing to the country, the two sisters fled the city for good. On that day Lorenzo was in Frattocchie, south of the city, visiting one of his stud farms and surveying the horses that he would use in the upcoming
chinea
ceremony, in which a cavalcade of noblemen rode through the streets of Rome to the Vatican, where they offered homage and gold coins to the pope. Not wanting to attract attention, Marie and Hortense set off in a small coach accompanied by only their maidservants Nanon and Morena, a valet, and almost no luggage. The jewels that Marie carried with her represented the parts of her identity that were most precious to her. The pearls that Louis XIV had given her had stayed with Marie throughout her years in Rome. She had worn them as she sat for portraits done by the celebrated artists who found patronage from the Colonna family. Her diamonds had been given
by her husband on the occasion of their marriage. Having the jewels in their possession as she and Hortense became fugitives caused her servants much anxiety, but for Marie they had a magical and protective effect.

Under their dresses, all four women wore men's clothes. It was a warm day and Marie cried out loudly to the carriage driver, “To Frascati!” thereby indicating to anyone who happened to be listening that they were headed southeast to a country villa just outside the city. But at the first corner, the valet, a German who worked for the Duchess Mazarin and had secretly arranged for a small boat to be readied for them, ordered the coachman to head northwest toward Civitavecchia on the Mediterranean instead. They were headed for the same port from which they had first embarked for France with their mother nineteen years earlier.

The two sisters had made secret and precise, if risky, arrangements. They hoped that they would not be missed for at least a day or so, but they were also very aware of the likelihood of being recognized or of drawing suspicion to themselves. It was not a common sight for two wealthy ladies to be traveling alone far outside of the city. Nor was it safe—their serving women, Nanon and Morena, were petrified and quite astonished at the ladies' calm when they decided to pull off the main road and wait to hear from the boatman some five miles from the port. Such was their fatigue that they even managed to sleep for two hours. They were exhilarated and tired but not frightened, though Marie began to despair of their escape as the hours flew by and no boatman appeared:

Just a few minutes later, they heard a horse approaching and waited anxiously, Hortense holding two pistols, until they recognized the rider as a valet who had been sent ahead to scout out the boat that had been arranged for them. He told them that the boat had been found. Despite their best efforts, the little party that straggled into the port must have drawn considerable attention. By this time the women had thrown off their outer layer of petticoats and were dressed in men's riding attire, but their disguises did not seem any more effective than the ones Hortense and Nanon had donned four years earlier on her flight from Paris. Even before they boarded the felucca that was waiting for them, the captain was demanding more money, and once they were on board he continued to raise his price, saying that he clearly was taking a great risk by agreeing to transport them. Hortense's valet, Pelletier, tried to argue, but Marie paid the man what he asked.

Travel by boat in the seventeenth century was a risky business. Not only might one encounter the usual array of storms and rough seas, but there was also the more serious danger of attack by pirates or capture by merchant ships of any number of countries that might not be on good terms with one's own. For an Italian vessel, the possibility of kidnapping was very real, and everyone was familiar with tales of capture by Turks or North Africans. An encounter with an unfriendly vessel could easily result in prolonged captivity, until family members or a religious order dedicated to the ransom of Christian captives might manage to negotiate a release. The felucca that the runaway sisters had boarded had the advantage of
speed—it was the narrowest and most nimble of sailing ships—but it was not well equipped for defense in the event of direct attack. And so Marie and Hortense did not doubt the danger ahead of them when after a few hours of sailing the captain spotted a brig and immediately steered their boat to the rocky coastline until he could determine that it was Genovese and not Turk. Their ship resumed its course that night, only to confront another hazard, a storm that produced waters so rough that everyone felt ill, especially Hortense, who told Marie she thought she would die. Marie was more worried about a shipwreck, as well as the honesty of the ship's crew. Both women were grateful to have found a captain who proved himself “honorable,” as Hortense later wrote: “Our greatest stroke of luck was to have fallen into the hands of a captain who was as skillful as he was honorable. Any other would have thrown us into the sea after having robbed us, for he could see from the first glance that we were no beggars. He said to himself, and his crew asked us ‘if we had killed the pope?' As for skill, suffice it to say that they sailed in a straight line one hundred miles off Genoa.”
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It took the ship eight days to reach Monaco, where the traveling party obtained counterfeit bills of health declaring them free of plague so that they could be permitted to enter French territory, and from there on to La Ciotat, a port city at the mouth of the Rhone River. There the four women and Hortense's valet were left to proceed by land.

The fugitives had been lucky in that Lorenzo had stayed at his stud farm for three days before returning to Rome. But upon his return he immediately knew what had happened. And he did not hesitate to take steps to retrieve the runaways. First he sent a dozen horsemen in pursuit, then a galley boat. So as Hortense and Marie made their way with Nanon and Morena over land, a galley filled with Lorenzo's men awaited them in Marseille, which seemed the most likely harbor to which they would head.

Lorenzo had no doubt that his wife was headed to France. Indeed, as his informants must have told him, Marie had obtained a letter from Louis XIV guaranteeing her safe passage into the country. She had written the Chevalier de Lorraine declaring her intention to leave Rome, and Lorraine had obtained this favor for her through his liaison with the king's brother. That Louis XIV had produced the letter, thus risking a break in his relations with Lorenzo and his faction in Rome, indicated that he believed Marie's fears about what might happen to her if she remained there. Armed with this royal passport, the Princess Colonna and the Duchess Mazarin approached Marseille. For his part, the Prince Colonna did not hesitate to appeal directly to the French ambassador in Rome and the ambassador's brother the Cardinal d'Estrées, who dispatched a letter to the bishop of Marseille:

The person in question, a Captain Manechini, in fact did arrive promptly and delivered Lorenzo's message to Marie as she waited in an auberge near the home of Monsieur Arnoux, the superintendent of the galleys in Marseille. Arnoux had previously delivered two letters to Marie, one for her from King Louis and one from his secretary of state for foreign affairs, Arnauld de Pomponne, directing the bearer to offer hospitality to the runaways. Following instructions
from Lorenzo, Captain Manechini attempted to persuade them to return to Rome, whereupon Marie refused, noting that Lorenzo was offering no real assurances for her safety and seemed concerned only that she not embarrass the family: “the messenger . . . came with nothing more to propose to me than that I return to the constable, or at the least that I wait until he could send me a train more in keeping with my quality, and all that was needed to continue my journey with greater splendor and decorum.” Manechini also attempted to appeal to her motherly instincts, but although she was touched by his invocation of the children she had left behind, she could not overcome her suspicions: “Although I loved them tremendously, I feared peril even more, and having no doubt that there was some scheme hidden beneath his charming words, I told him succinctly that I had no intention of returning.”
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