The Kings' Mistresses (22 page)

As usual, Hortense appeared unfazed by the envy and resentment that her new status was generating all around her, but she also seemed to be quite enjoying herself. Her pleasure, even in this privileged instance, took on a reckless aura, as she showed no inclination
to devote herself exclusively to the king's company, though she was said to be almost constantly with him. By late spring, as the damp London winter finally began to dissipate, the king and Hortense were taking frequent promenades together along the Thames.

In the same months that her relationship with Charles was developing, she befriended the young Countess of Sussex, Charles's illegitimate daughter by Barbara Villiers. Hortense and the young girl became inseparable. Anne was just fourteen and had been married off a year earlier to Thomas Leonard, a Gentleman of the King's Bedchamber. The new Lord Sussex was fond of cricket and of country life; he was not drawn to the sophisticated pleasures of the capital city. Lady Sussex had opposing tastes, and she became infatuated with Hortense. The two of them were frequently together at Saint James's Park. Hortense delighted in this passionate friendship and neither of them seemed to mind that they were said to be lovers. Hortense taught Anne how to hunt, and the two of them took fencing lessons, practicing together in the park on one occasion even by starlight, when they were spotted in nightgowns, with swords drawn.

It was a mark of Charles's famous tolerance and libertine leanings that he did not put a stop to this, though it was also true that no one at the time would have thought it overly scandalous that two women could have had a sexual attraction to each other. Physical beauty, when it was powerful enough, was thought to quite naturally attract both sexes. Saint-Evremond would write admiringly that “Hortense has claimed lovers of both sexes.” But what Charles did not tolerate, in the end, was Anne's decision to refuse to return to her husband when he eventually tried to summon her back to their country estate. The young countess was forcibly removed by her husband's guards from the Duchess Mazarin's household and sent to France to be incarcerated in a convent.

Once in London, Hortense had first been lodged in the Saint James palace in the center of the city, residence of the Duke and
Duchess of York, where she was warmly welcomed. Soon afterward, Mary Beatrice's husband, James, would purchase a spacious house in Saint James's Park, next door to the palace, and he invited his wife's fugitive cousin to live there with her household. Hortense moved in with Mustapha, Nanon, a number of other servants, and her growing collection of pets, including hunting dogs and exotic parrots. Soon she was receiving visitors. One of the first to arrive was Saint-Réal, who provided a collection of books for her library and stood ready to serve as her loyal squire, though he was quickly deflated. Another was Honoré Courtin, the newly appointed French ambassador, who took to spending hours at a time in the duchess's salon and library. Visitors were particularly attracted to the openness of Hortense's household, the same quality that Saint-Réal had described in the flattering letter he had published with her memoirs. Visitors could come whenever they wished and settle into a room with others or find a corner of the library in which to read in solitude. There seemed to be few restrictions on who could come and go, and there was no set day of the week when she would receive visitors and no early hour when visitors were required to leave. This was a unique and intriguing practice. Courtin reported to the French court that “we always stay there until midnight, the house is very pleasant, and living there is very comfortable. . . . I occupy a large chair by the fire-side with one of the books that I take from the library that the abbé de Saint-Réal has established. . . . Madame Mazarin's temperament is as attractive as her appearance.”
¹¹

For many of the visitors to Hortense's salon in those years, she came to symbolize a kind of enviable female freedom, albeit a freedom that was perpetually threatened by an uncertain future. Anne of Sussex was one young woman who had been inspired to follow the dangerous path her friend had taken. Saint-Evremond wrote a portrait describing Hortense's daring flight from her husband as an adventure that should inspire other women. The writer Marie-Catherine
d'Aulnoy described the Mazarin residence as the center of all that was most interesting and vibrant in London society, declaring it “the meeting-place of all that was illustrious and witty in London: I went there often. Everyone recounted news there, there was gambling, good food, and the days passed like moments.”
¹²
Fiction writers and playwrights modeled their heroine's escapades on those of Hortense. Marie-Catherine Desjardins, who had been Hortense's friend in Paris, wrote the pseudomemoirs of an adventurous runaway woman who had the same initials as the Duchess Mazarin.
¹³
They were immediately translated into English. Years later, Susanna Centlivre would stage her play
The Basset Table
about a salon like the Duchess Mazarin's. There, a character named Lady Reveler presided over a diverse social group where gambling mixed with music, poetry reading, and discussions of the new science. As the years wore on, Hortense's endless struggles with her husband also became the focal point for discussions by feminist writers such as Mary Astell and Aphra Behn about women's rights in the legal institution of marriage.

During her first years in London, Hortense continued to negotiate for the income that had been promised her by Louis XIV, but her efforts were continually frustrated, no doubt in part because it was known that Charles had granted her a pension. She lived comfortably, even long after her liaison with the king had ended. She took pleasure in the fascination that she continued to exert over London society during those years of the Restoration. Saint-Evremond collaborated with musicians, composers, and Hortense herself on at least eight short operas performed in her residence between 1678 and 1692. The Duchess Mazarin often sang in these productions. She embraced her reputation as hostess to an unusually diverse society of artists, foreigners, political figures, and royalty, as well as travelers and tourists of all social stations. Her reputation as a powerful and paradoxical woman only grew
and became more linked with legend as time went on. The writers and painters among her friends helped to foster this reputation, as Saint-Evremond wrote that “Madame Mazarin had the air, habit, and equipage of a Queen of the Amazons; she appeared equally equipped to charm and to fight.”
¹⁴
Hortense was painted in exotic fashion, as Cleopatra and as Diana, goddess of the hunt. As a French woman of Italian origin at the English court, she already was easily cast as mysterious, foreign, and more than slightly dangerous. Added to these traits were her personal penchants for hunting, swordplay, gambling, and exotic pets, and the constant stream of mixed company in her relaxed household. The most stunning painting of her produced during her early years in London was a huge oil canvas (ninety by seventy inches) by Benedetto Gennari,
Duchess Mazarin Dressed as Diana,
which she probably commissioned and hung in her lodgings. In the center of the painting she sits in a languid pose, bare-breasted and with her long dark curls hanging loosely over her shoulders, holding a spear. Unlike the goddess Diana she is surrounded not by nymphs but by hunting dogs and four dark-skinned boys dressed as pages. A parrot is perched on a fountain behind her. The pages wear silver collars identical to those worn by the dogs. One of the pages, the only one who is not smiling, is a young man, older than the others, and he stands behind the duchess, collecting water from the fountain as he gazes at her.

This figure is thought to be Mustapha, one of only two people in her circle who were consistently described as loyal to her. As a servant, whose status was in effect that of a slave, he was not in a position to freely choose his loyalties. Her other loyal follower was Saint-Evremond. Saint-Evremond embraced the publicity her presence generated in London. He wrote essays dedicated to her and letters advocating for her in her widely published legal disputes with her husband. In verse and in prose he used terms stressing characteristics that seemed always to be linked with her: foreigner (“beautiful
Roman”), strong woman (“Amazon”), traveler (“adventurer and vagabond”), independent soul.

Hortense's friendship with Saint-Evremond was an unusual one. Saint-Evremond had been living in London since 1662, when he had fled France fearing arrest for having published an attack on French foreign policy under Cardinal Mazarin. In France he had been known as a reckless but accomplished writer, philosopher, poet, diplomat, and wit, whose downfall came, as one friend put it, “because he did not know how to hold his tongue.”
¹⁵
He was also a libertine whose closest friendships had been with other figures famous for causing scandals: Ninon de l'Enclos, noted for her culture and learning as much as for her philosophy and practice of free love, and the Count of Grammont, expelled from France for publicly criticizing the early years of Louis XIV's reign and attempting to seduce the king's mistress. When Saint-Evremond first met Hortense, she was twenty-nine and he sixty-two. His letters to Ninon de l'Enclos and other friends in Paris showed that, like everyone else, he was infatuated with the duchess, but unlike her other new admirers he had no illusion that he might be able to consummate the relationship. Even his affectionate friends described him by then as an old man no longer capable of attracting lovers, though his personal physician, Pierre Silvestre, described him as “well made,” a man who had “retained even to a very advanced age, a natural and easy carriage.” He had a fondness for direct speech and undisguised opinions, a distaste for the elaborate protocol of the court, and a sharp eye for anything that might make a good subject of ridicule. “His eyes were blue, keen, and full of fire,” wrote Silvestre, “his face bright and intelligent, his smile somewhat satirical. In youth he had had fine black hair, but though it had become quite white, and even very sparse, he never would wear a wig, and contented himself with wearing a skull cap.”
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Saint-Evremond wrote incessantly but rarely published, viewing the profession of “author” with some disdain. His works were written for his friends, and if they circulated any further it would be because his friends saw to it both during his lifetime and after his death. Hortense was happy to find in him much that she missed of Paris: “His conversation was gay and easy, his repartees lively and incisive, his manners good and polite; in a word, one can say of him that in all things he showed himself to be a man of quality.”
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The two were kindred souls. He saw in her much of his own propensity for risk and love of pleasure, and in her life's adventures a vindication of the bold criticism of absolute authority that was a hallmark of his own philosophy and writings. They became close friends; he advised her on negotiating the unfamiliar labyrinth of London society and then stood by like an indulgent uncle when she ignored his counsel. His character was a perfect contrast to that of Cardinal Mazarin, and it seemed fitting that his own exile had been precipitated by his attacks on the prime minister. To Hortense he made no secret of his hatred of this particular member of her family. He no doubt had chuckled when he read in her memoirs that her response to the cardinal's death was “Thank God he's croaked.” Among the many literary tokens that Saint-Evremond would offer to Hortense as gifts would be a collection of bitter verses aimed at her uncle's memory.

The writer and the Duchess Mazarin conducted a lively correspondence throughout her life in London, even as they saw each other often on a daily basis. When in 1689 Saint-Evremond finally received official permission to return to live in France, he declined, saying that he had found all he needed in London: “In the country in which I now am, I see Madame Mazarin every day; I live among people who are sociable and friendly, who have great cleverness and much wit.”
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Of Hortense's letters to him, none remain, but many of Saint-Evremond's written to her have survived, and they give us
an intimate look at her life there. He also wrote to many others about her, adding considerably to the quantity of reports on her life and descriptions of her person that were already circulating throughout Europe.

From the beginning, he expressed his delight in this newcomer to London society, who inaugurated something close to a Parisian salon, but freer, frequented by an even more diverse and cosmopolitan array of visitors. He was pleased by her immediate success with Charles II and encouraged the liaison for its obvious benefits to Hortense's personal security in England. He was amused by the efforts of the French envoys to draw her into a more political role, and was not surprised when she proved to be too much of a free spirit to excel at either espionage or diplomacy. He was concerned about her strong fondness for gambling and drink, but he never tired of having to draw her away from the gaming table to more serious conversations. Gaming and intellectual pursuits went comfortably hand in hand in Hortense's salon, and indeed in many of the salons of her day. It would not be until decades later that gambling became the subject of extended and disapproving moral treatises. To be sure, religious groups condemned the popularity of gaming, but to the epicurean Saint-Evremond the danger of gaming for the Duchess Mazarin was simply that she could not afford to lose, and losing was inevitable. And he personally could not understand how one could be drawn to gambling over the supreme pleasure of finding oneself at the center of endless clever conversation.

The friendship between these two was alternately playful and serious. Saint-Evremond knew that Hortense was fond of chivalric romances like
Amadis of Gaul,
and he read with her from
Don Quixote,
suggesting to her that he was like the besotted knight and she his elusive Dulcinea. Hortense entered into the game, for years signing her letters to him “Dulcinea to Don Quixote,” and he signing his “to Dulcinea, from the sad-faced knight.” His friends took
to calling him “Madame Mazarin's knight,” or “the champion of Madame Mazarin.” When, some years after her arrival, she confided in him that she was thinking of joining her sister in her Madrid convent, he wrote her a desperate, adoring, and outraged letter: