The Kings' Mistresses (32 page)

The pearls had stayed with Marie throughout her years in Rome as wife to the Grand Constable Colonna. She had worn them as she sat for portraits done by the celebrated artists who found patronage from the Colonna family: Pierre Mignard, Jacob-Ferdinand Voet, Carlo Maratta, Gaspard Dughet. She had taken them with her when she and her sister Hortense became fugitives, causing her servants much anxiety but somehow having a magical and quieting effect on the two ladies, who had amazed their small entourage by calmly going into the woods and falling asleep as they waited for the boatman who had promised to take them to France.

Even during her most difficult years in Madrid in the 1680s, when Marie was desperate to find allies against her husband's efforts to have her imprisoned, she had kept Louis's gift close to her and even worn her pearls in the most incongruous of circumstances. When Father Delmas recorded the pearls in his inventory of Marie's possessions at death, he knew her intentions for them. She had made it clear in her will. They were never to be sold, and must remain in her family for all time.
¹⁴

A few months after Marie's final conversation with Father Ascanio, on September 1, 1715, Louis XIV died of a gangrenous infection, bringing to an end his fifty-five-year reign, at the time the longest in European history.

Even in death, Marie wanted to leave a trace of a life committed to mobility and independence. She left instructions that she be buried wherever she was when she died. Her youngest son, Carlo, carried out her wishes, arranging her burial in Pisa. Inside the church of the Santo Sepulcro on the floor just inside the main door, the attentive visitor may still find her tombstone with the simple marker in Latin that she had requested:

Marie's wishes for a modest marker for her grave, and for a final resting place wherever her life's travels came to an end, seem to reflect a peace that she managed to achieve in her later years, and an acceptance of the unpredictable and vagrant life she had come to see as the only one that would give her the freedom she desired. The events surrounding Hortense's death and burial, on the other hand, seem to dramatize just how grotesquely difficult her risky life choices had been. Yet both sisters had decided, early in life, to pursue adventures that were unprecedented for women of their time, and that they knew would lead, inevitably, to more exposure to public condemnation than they could even dream of. They embraced the notoriety that came to them, publishing their own memoirs in response to the many accounts of their lives being circulated by a European society that found them fascinating. They were frequently at the center of public controversies, admired by libertines, feminists, and free-thinkers but viewed by others as frivolous at best and threats to civil society at worst.

There were many “firsts” in the lives of these two sisters. They were arguably the first media celebrities, in the earliest years of journalism, when news of prominent people and current events was just beginning to be given circulation in print. Hortense was the first Frenchwoman not of royal blood to print her life story under her own name, and Marie followed suit one year later. Marie was already a writer who had seen her work into print, having been arguably the first woman in Europe to author a book on astrology. The 1689 legal dispute between the Duke and Duchess Mazarin became the first divorce case to be aired in the media. Hortense was the first woman to be included in turn-of-the-century treatises about famous gamblers. The sisters were among the first women to travel for pleasure, adventure, and escape. Both sisters served as examples to the first generation of free-thinkers and feminists in France and England who were broadening an older philosophical discussion on the
equality of women to include a critique of marriage and arguments for the rights of women to live, own property, and move about independently. The claims that they made for their own autonomy became part of these public debates.

In the years following the end of Louis XIV's reign, there was an explosion of writing about his court and the lives of those who had helped him to create it. From the beginning, historians had trouble figuring out what to make of the two notorious nieces of Cardinal Mazarin. But even their most severe judges acknowledged the impact the two women had made on the imaginations, and often the lives, of their contemporaries. Some echoed the warnings of Pope Innocent XI, who had declared ominously that the Mancini sisters exemplified a new “class of women.”
¹⁵
Others would give a more positive spin to that assessment, labeling the sisters “les illustres aventurières”—an epithet that paired their scandalous adventures with their education and accomplishments in the world of high culture. That women could have “adventures” of their own choosing, leave their families in favor of a life on the road, and then survive, even find pleasure in the risks that accompanied such choices, was viewed as the stuff of fiction. Hortense and Marie would continue to surprise, scandalize, and delight all who came into contact with their amazing stories. From the beginning of their adventures the sisters had recognized that their lives, in Hortense's words, would “seem like something out of a novel.” But the plot was one that they were determined to construct for themselves, in a perpetual process of self-invention and renewal aimed at showing everyone what Marie described simply as “the truth in its own light.”

All translations of original material into English are by the author unless otherwise indicated.

1
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/civilwar/g5/cs1/s5
.

2
Philippe Erlanger,
The Age of Courts and Kings
(New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 209.

3
Joan DeJean,
The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour
(New York: Free Press, 2005), p. 208.

4
John Lough,
France Observed in the Seventeenth Century by British Travellers
(London: Oriel Press, 1985), p. 149.

1
Marie Mancini,
The Truth in Its Own Light, or: The Genuine Memoirs of M. Mancini, Constabless Colonna,
in Hortense Mancini and Marie Mancini,
Memoirs
, ed. and trans. Sarah Nelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 85.

2
Ibid., p. 86.

3
Ibid., p. 87.

4
Ibid., p. 90.

5
Pierre Adolphe Chéruel, ed.,
Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier
(Paris: Charpentier, 1859), vol. 3, p. 352.

6
Françoise Bertaut de Motteville,
Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne of Austria and Her Court,
trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley (Boston: Hardy, Pratt, and Co., 1902), vol. 3, pp. 171–172.

7
Chéruel,
Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier,
vol. 3, p. 328.

8
Mancini,
Truth in Its Own Light,
p. 95.

9
Ibid.

10
Memoirs of Mademoiselle de Montpensier
(London: H. Colburn, 1848), vol. 2, p. 478.

11
Motteville,
Memoirs of Madame de Motteville,
vol. 3, pp. 176–177.

12
Mancini,
Truth in Its Own Light,
p. 97.

13
Lucien Perey [Clara Adèle Luce Herpin],
Le Roman du grand roi, Louis XIV et Marie Mancini d'après des lettres et documents inédits
(Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1894), p. 169.

14
Mancini,
Truth in Its Own Light,
p. 96.

15
Jules Mazarin,
Cardinal Mazarin's Letters to Lewis XI, the Present King of France, On His Love to the Cardinal's Niece
(London: Bentley, 1691), pp. 172–173.

16
Ibid., pp. 164–165.

17
Perey,
Le Roman du grand roi,
p. 253.

18
Mazarin,
Cardinal Mazarin's Letters,
p. 185.

19
Perey,
Le Roman du grand roi,
p. 236.

20
Motteville,
Memoirs of Madame de Motteville,
vol. 3, p. 179.

21
Perey,
Le Roman du grand roi,
pp. 367–369.

22
Ibid., p. 370.

23
Ibid., p. 319.

24
Ibid., p. 318–319.

25
Ibid., p. 332.

26
Mancini,
Truth in Its Own Light,
p. 98.

27
Ibid., p. 100.

28
Ibid., p. 99.

29
Ibid., p. 100.

1
In Hortense Mancini and Marie Mancini,
Memoirs,
ed. and trans. Sarah Nelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 34.

2
Ibid., p. 33.

3
Lucien Perey [Clara Adèle Luce Herpin],
Le Roman du grand roi
,
Louis XIV et Marie Mancini d'après des lettres et documents inédits
(Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1894), p. 253.

4
Ibid., p. 189.

5
Pierre Adolphe Chéruel, ed.,
Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier
(Paris: Charpentier, 1859), vol. 3, p. 387.

6
Guy Patin,
Lettres
, ed. Joseph-Henri Réveillé-Parise (Paris: Baillère, 1846), vol. 2, pp. 458–459.

7
Mancini,
Memoirs,
p. 36.

8
For an explanation of the monetary systems and their rough equivalents today, see Sarah Nelson's summary note in her translation of the Mancini memoirs, pp. 35–36.

9
Mancini,
Memoirs,
pp. 36–37.

10
Ibid., p. 41.

11
Ibid., pp. 43–44.

12
Georges Mongrédien,
Une aventurière au grand siècle, la duchesse Mazarin
(Paris: Amiot-Dumont, 1952), p. 49.

13
Ibid., pp. 44–45.

14
Saint-Simon,
Memoires
, ed. Yves Coirault (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), vol. 4, p. 561.

15
François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxim 503
,
in
The Maxims of François de La Rochefoucauld,
trans. F. G. Stevens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), p. 154.

16
Mancini,
Memoirs
, p. 47.

17
Ibid., p. 48.

18
Ibid., p. 51.

19
Ibid.

21
Mancini,
Memoirs,
p. 52.

22
Madeleine de Scudéry,
The Story of Sapho
, trans. Karen Newman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 140–141.

23
François Poullain de la Barre, “On the Equality of the Two Sexes,” in
Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises
, ed. Marcelle Maistre Welch, trans. Vivien Bosley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 77.

24
Mancini,
Memoirs,
p. 52.

25
Ibid., p. 55.

26
Ibid., p. 56.

27
Ibid.

28
Ibid.

29
Ibid., p. 57.

30
Ibid., p. 58.

1
Lucien Perey [Clara Adèle Luce Herpin],
Le Roman du grand roi, Louis XIV et Marie Mancini d'après des lettres et documents inédits
(Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1894), pp. 379–380.

2
François Poullain de la Barre, “On the Equality of the Two Sexes,” in
Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises
, ed. Marcelle Maistre Welch, trans. Vivien Bosley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 55.

3
Claude Dulong,
Marie Mancini, la première passion de Louis XIV
(Paris: Perrin, 1993), p. 134.

4
Marie Mancini,
The Truth in Its Own Light, or: The Genuine Memoirs of M. Mancini, Constabless Colonna
, in Hortense Mancini and Marie Mancini,
Memoirs
, ed. and trans. Sarah Nelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 106.

5
Perey,
Le Roman du grand roi
, vol. 2, pp. 573–574.

6
Lucien Perey [Clara Adèle Luce Herpin],
Une princesse romaine au xvlle siècle
,
Marie Mancini Colonna, d'après des documents inédits
(Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1896), p. 33.

7
Mancini,
Truth in Its Own Light,
p. 107.