The Kings' Mistresses (31 page)

Ortensia would ultimately call upon her old friend to help her in a vastly more delicate matter, asking that she persuade Filippo, the new Constable Colonna, to provide for the livelihood of her children who had been fathered by Lorenzo. And Marie did so, writing to her son and then, when the countess reported that he had not yet made any accommodation, lending further support and advising her on how to proceed:

Marie's efforts, though, were not sufficient to assure Ortensia's children of the income that had been promised them in Lorenzo's will. Ortensia and her son brought their case before judges in Rome in 1692 and won a settlement the following year. Although Marie managed in these years to remain involved and play a respected role, from a distance, in her family's affairs, the political climate in Spain had changed abruptly after her friend and ally Queen Marie-Louise died suddenly in 1689, at age twenty-six, of an attack of what seemed to be appendicitis. She had borne no children, so the disturbed and probably impotent King Carlos was married off quickly a second time, to the German Princess Mary Anna of Neuberg, who was selected for her likely fertility (her mother had borne twenty-three children). But no progeny came from this royal marriage either. By 1699 everyone was watching Carlos's demented behavior and speculating about what was likely to be a highly contested succession. The new Queen Mary Anna, with whom Marie had worked to ally herself, was not popular. She was prone to hysteria and suffered from the relentless pressure to conceive a child with an uncooperative husband; it was thought that she faked her miscarriages. She was perpetually leaving the court to seek relief in
the homes of foreign nobility, who whispered that when she left she always seemed to carry off with her several objects of value.

Marie spent time with French visitors and residents of Madrid, including the mother of her friend Madame d'Aulnoy. Madame d'Aulnoy's mother, Madame de Gudannes, was not a good adviser to Marie; though she was certainly a very intelligent woman, she was noted for her duplicity and the ease with which she could play double agent when called upon to provide secret information. At different points in her career she had been employed by the French, the Spanish, and the Italians to acquire secret information of one kind or another. Her spying inevitably ended with her being thrown out of the country. As a political operator she had acquired a certain power over courtiers who feared blackmail, but she was hardly the best source of information or advice for someone like Marie. It was exciting, though, to participate in the conversations she hosted in her garden next to the family residence of the Admiral of Castille, where Marie had first been sheltered upon arriving in the city. Marie spent many mornings in this garden until Gudannes was suddenly and unceremoniously escorted out of Spain.

The death of the childless Carlos II in 1700 brought to a head tensions over the succession. Carlos himself had favored the French over the Austrian faction and on his deathbed designated Philippe d'Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV and Marie-Thérèse of Spain, as his heir. The young French prince would make his triumphal entry into Madrid on February 18, 1701. The new King Philip V drew around him and his thirteen-year-old bride, Marie Louise Gabriele de Savoie, a close coterie of French advisers and supporters. Marie wanted to be among these, and she angled for a position as governess to the young queen, but it was not to be. Louis XIV took a personal interest in selecting the French circle that he wanted to be able to control Spain. Marie's loyalties to France were hazy at best, and hers was not the exemplary life that would make an ideal centerpiece for the education of a princess.

And so in the decade that followed, Marie found herself once again traveling throughout Europe. In each spot where she settled, she found herself always a little too attracted to risk and intrigue, a little too trusting of all who offered her their friendship. In 1702 she rented a house in Avignon, where she met a shady character named Don Alfio Morando de Mazarin, who claimed to be a long-lost relative with strong ties to Versailles. Within three months she had signed over her rights to several important family legacies, much to the consternation of her sons. Later she fell almost as quickly in the thrall of another confidence man, this time a monk named Father Florent, whom she obliged by introducing him to various important and wealthy personages whom he proceeded to rob, shamelessly.

It was to bring suit against this renegade that she returned to Paris in 1704, for the first time in forty-four years, and the last time in her life. She found herself once again close to the French court and king. But neither Marie nor Louis made any attempt at a meeting. She did write to her son of how she felt to be once again in the city of her youth: “You will be surprised to know I am so close to Paris, in one of my brother's houses in the country, just a half league away. . . . Paris is well worth being seen by everyone. I find it much more beautiful than I had left it. The streets, the bridges, and the buildings are like nowhere else.”
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It would be only in the last two or three years of her life that Marie seemed to finally settle into a more peaceful rhythm for her existence, visiting her sons but living in her own homes in Genoa and Livorno, and returning frequently to her beloved Venice.

It was in Pisa, Italy, on the morning of May 10, 1715, that the Reverend Father Ascanio was interrupted at his duties in the church of Santo Sepulcro by a servant come to tell him that Princess Colonna was in the city and was summoning him to the home of her relative the Duke Salvati. Ascanio was surprised. He had known Marie Mancini Colonna since the years immediately following the
death of her estranged husband, when she had first dared to return to Italy from her long exile in Spain. She had found in this intelligent Spanish monk a sympathetic listener and adviser whenever she was in Pisa, and had come to rely on him for advice on matters legal as well as spiritual. He had counseled her on the writing of her will. But her sons and family residence were in Rome, and Ascanio had not, on this occasion, received any advance notice of her visit. As he walked to the Salvati palazzo he must have been perplexed and perhaps concerned, reflecting sadly on the lady's age and on the recent events that had befallen her, and marveling at the energy that kept this inveterate traveler perpetually on the road. Just a few months before, she had suffered two bereavements, first that of her younger sister, Marianne, Duchess of Bouillon, and then an even heavier blow, the death of her eldest son, Filippo. Marianne's death had been sudden and entirely unexpected. Of the surviving Mancini siblings, she was known as the one with the most charming temperament, always lively, always seeming innocent and youthful. Upon receiving the letter informing her of this death, Marie must have thought back to many moments in her own adventurous life when her young sister had been one of her few loyal friends. Filippo's death had been less of a surprise, as it came at the end of a long illness, but he was her firstborn son. He had been the first to forgive her for leaving her children behind when she fled her husband's household, and in later years he had been her most faithful family correspondent. Father Ascanio had heard that Marie Colonna had made a hurried and exhausting voyage by carriage from Livorno to Rome, arriving just in time to hold her son in her arms as he died.

Now this seventy-five-year-old woman had traveled from the residence where she had been living in Livorno, and was back in Pisa, urgently asking to speak with him. The good priest was sympathetic, but he also had other obligations to attend to and his own health
was failing. He knew how demanding she could be and prepared himself to urge her to be patient. He was not ready on that day for the intense and lengthy conversations that he knew she would require. When he arrived at the Salvati residence, he later wrote in his report of the events, he

At noon she suddenly appeared in his doorway, saying she had been praying at the Carmelite church and wanted him to explain a passage from the gospel to her. “I satisfied this pious request,” he reported, “and then accompanied her back to the Salvati residence, again repeating that I wanted her to think of me on that day as being in the other world.”
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But at the end of the day she appeared once more at the door of the Santo Sepulcro priory, and this time she simply stared intently at Father Ascanio and the papers and books surrounding him, before collapsing on the floor. Doctors were called, but they could do nothing to reverse the attack of “apoplexy,” or stroke; they could only lift her onto the monk's cot, where she died a few hours later. It was left to Ascanio to alert her household in Pisa and write a letter reporting the sad news to her two surviving sons and their families, while Marie's personal chaplain, Father Delmas, was summoned to take the inventory of her belongings at the time of her death, beginning with the objects she had brought with her to Pisa and finishing with a list of the items in her household in Livorno.

Anyone who didn't know the owner of these materials would have understood, at first look, that they were the property of a noblewoman with considerable wealth. But examined more closely, the inventory of the deceased's personal belongings had some mysterious aspects. The contents of the lady's wardrobe were impressive—they included a vast amount of fine clothing and luxury items, and there was perhaps even more than the usual array of laces and rich fabrics: satins, velvet, Indian silks and cottons, and finely embroidered linens. Their owner had traveled and had exotic tastes. She possessed numerous Spanish mirrors, combs, and fans, which were carefully packed in a small metal chest lined with green velvet, and she had two soft velvet cushions for her little pet dogs. She had traveled from Livorno to Pisa in her personal carriage, designed in the modern style with glass windows, and upholstered in the traditional red velvet. Back in Livorno she left several other means of transportation, unusual for an elderly widow: along with horses and mules she owned a light two-wheeled carriage designed for speedy travel and a small movable seat called a flying chair, which could be rigged to whisk its rider from an upper floor down the open stairwell to make a dramatic appearance when receiving guests. She was educated: there were books, mostly translated volumes of classical Roman authors such as Juvenal and Virgil. In Livorno there were also many fabrics and tapestries but almost no works of art—no family portraits or paintings decorating the walls, a most unusual absence for a person of her standing, and especially for a noblewoman who had been famous as a great art patron. The galleries of paintings and statuary in the palazzo Colonna were the envy of the European nobility, and Marie and her husband alone had amassed more than 4,000 works of art. But as a woman who had made the radical choice to abandon her husband's household, Constabless Colonna had forfeited all claim to the treasured possessions she had acquired during her marriage, a legal restriction that her sons had continued to observe even after their father's death.

In fact, most of the items in the inventory Father Delmas prepared were designated as legally owned not by Marie Colonna but by her sons, to whom they were to be returned after her death. Among the objects held in her own name were only two of any exceptional value, but they were stunning. It was striking, too, that she had carried these items with her even on what was essentially a personal business trip to take counsel from Father Ascanio. Though the two items were small, Father Delmas, who knew the stories behind them, must have been struck by their beauty and by the incongruous decision that had been made to bring them on this particular voyage. The first was a pair of diamond-encrusted brooches, exquisitely designed, which had been offered to Marie as a wedding gift from her husband, Lorenzo. And the second was a magnificent strand of royal jewels, thirty-five large pearls that had been given to Marie in 1659, one year before her marriage, by Louis XIV.

“I do not know that I have any debts,” Marie had written in her will, “but if I do they must be paid forthwith by my heirs.” What pride and what struggle she had felt and undergone in the fifty-five years since these two prize jewels had come into her possession, and how determined she had been to keep them in her possession through her life of wealth and poverty, independence, despair, and exhilaration. In her memoirs she had described these objects as pieces of her identity, the only jewels she had taken with her on that warm day in 1672 when she fled her husband, never to return. “And so I set out on the twenty-ninth of May, carrying no more on my person than seven hundred pistoles, my pearls, and some diamond pendants.” In her travels the jewels only made her more vulnerable to the constant risk of robbery or capture, but she had always seemed to view them as a charm, somehow protecting her from danger. Father Delmas, studying them, would have appreciated the strength and beauty of this strand of gems that had survived such an adventurous and volatile life's itinerary. The pearls were legendary, like their owner and like the king who had given them.