The Kings' Mistresses (19 page)

As his visits became more frequent, Saint-Réal observed the way that she accepted and even welcomed the inevitability of public exposure. At first this alarmed him, but he soon came to admire this quality as a sign of her courage, honesty, and unashamed pleasure taken in the company of others. Clearly she was a woman unlike any he had met before. “Although by nature she is quite private almost every hour of the day is public for her: the most secret spots
in the house are as open as the common areas for those who visit her . . . her servants have become used to letting people come and go freely.”
⁸

Hortense had made another conquest. Saint-Réal's descriptions of her were openly adoring. When he described her eyes it was with the voice of a man who has fallen completely in love, and yet one who fears that his adoration will never be reciprocated: “The color of her eyes has no name. Neither blue, nor grey, nor quite black, but a blend of all of these. . . . When she stares at you, which happens rarely, you feel that a light has penetrated to the depths of your soul and you abandon all hope of hiding anything from her. . . . It is as though she were born to be loved, but not to love.”
⁹
Over the months that followed their first meeting, Saint-Réal would spend many hours and days in her company. When she did discuss her own life, he urged her to write about it and offered his assistance, as one who had recent experience with the volatile world of both publishing and managing a public self-image.

Sometime in these months the Duchess Mazarin completed writing her memoirs and entrusted their printing and circulation to her new devoted friend. The book's publication would be the first time a French woman not of royal blood had written her life story with her name, as author, printed on the title page. The Duchess Mazarin knew of other women of her class who had written their life stories, but none, with the exception of one or two queens of France, had signed their names to their published autobiographies. If female writers circulated their works, it was to private circles of friends and even then, under cover of anonymity. And to commit one's private life to print was by definition a major transgression for a woman, a fact Hortense acknowledged in the opening paragraph of her autobiography: “I know that a woman's glory lies in her not giving rise to gossip,” she wrote, “but one cannot always choose the kind of life one would like to lead.”
¹⁰
It was as though she recognized that the cover of anonymity was not possible for her. But publishing her
life's adventures was a way to make her own voice heard among the many others who were already spinning her story in public. She had already gone public with her life when she made her fateful decision to strike out on her own. Now she had to fight to retain the liberty she had taken such risks to preserve. The support of a powerful patron along with the assistance of a sympathetic and well-connected author in getting her story into circulation were opportunities that she embraced.

As she finished her memoirs, Hortense declared that in Chambéry “I have finally found the peace I had been seeking fruitlessly for so long, and where I have remained ever since, with much more tranquility than a woman as unfortunate as I should have.”
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This sounded like the voice of a mature writer at the end of her life's odyssey. But the Duchess Mazarin was just twenty-nine years old. And the calm she had found in Savoy would be only a brief pause in her tumultuous life.

Perhaps because of that peacefulness, to the citizens of Chambéry, Hortense may have seemed altogether too sure of the Duke of Savoy's patronage and protection. Members of Hortense's little itinerant household, having drawn closer to one another through the challenges they had faced in their travels, felt superior to the Savoyard pages at the court of Chambéry, and they let it show. Feuding developed between different camps. Members of the court who favored the Savoyard duchess, who found herself eclipsed in her husband's attentions by the exotic Hortense, were quick to pick quarrels with Hortense and her circle. Because Charles-Emmanuel was frequently absent from Chambéry, doing business in Turin, Hortense found herself increasingly exposed to hostility. By the time spring arrived in the cold mountain city, most of the provincial nobility in Chambéry who had been so eager for her company in the beginning appeared tired of her aristocratic airs.

Charles-Emmanuel, in Turin, received reports of confrontations between Hortense and his subjects over matters of protocol. Tensions
escalated between members of Hortense's private household and the servants of the local elite. During carnival, brawls broke out. When Charles-Emmanuel demanded that apologies be formally made to the Duchess Mazarin, these budding resentments blossomed into hatred. Hortense soon recognized that Chambéry might not much longer be her comfortable haven.

In early June 1675 she wrote a letter to Finance Minister Colbert asking for an advance on her pension, and she began to plan for a departure, though she knew not where she would go. As it happened, the decision to leave soon was made for her. On June 12, Charles-Emmanuel suddenly died, at the age of forty; poison was suspected. In the interim until his young son Victor-Amadeus could reach the age of majority, the Duchess Jeanne-Baptiste of Savoy became regent. She had been forced to suffer Hortense's presence while her husband was alive, but after his death she wasted no time in sending word to Hortense that she was no longer welcome as a guest of the family. Hortense turned her sights toward England, where her cousin Mary Beatrice of Modena had married the king's brother. But she refused to leave immediately, showing herself to be unperturbed by the regent's demands and outwardly continuing her daily life as usual. Then in late October she departed suddenly and without fanfare, alerting almost no one and taking with her only a few members of her household. The ever-dutiful Orlier accompanied her on the beginning of her voyage but he was not informed of her final destination; indeed, perhaps not even Hortense knew at this point where she would end up, for the itinerary she would follow before arriving in London two months later was circuitous. “She left on the 22nd of this month to spend the night in Annecy and I accompanied her half way,” Orlier wrote in a letter.

Had Saint-Réal been one other person to whom she confided her departure? Nothing is certain, but he did leave Chambéry soon after, heading for Paris. There he acted as her negotiator at the court and even with Duke Mazarin, attempting to help the couple arrive at some kind of satisfactory truce. Saint-Réal also devoted himself to seeing to the printing and translation of her memoirs. When, in January 1676, the Duchess Mazarin arrived on the coast of England after nearly three months of dangerous flight across the war-torn states of northern Europe, César Vichard de Saint-Réal was not far behind. The English translation of her memoirs appeared in London only weeks later.

If Charles-Emmanuel had not spent as much time with Hortense in Chambéry as he would have liked, this was due at least in part to the efforts he was making in Turin on behalf of her sister. Marie had not remained long in the abbey of Avenay after having been exiled there from Lys. She had understood that further attempts to move closer to Paris would be rebuffed. Avenay had other disadvantages: it was not as comfortable an environment as Lys, it was more difficult to receive visitors there, and she complained of the “bad air” that made her feel constantly ill. Though she made an attempt to occupy herself with worthy projects, such as reading and studying with her chaplain Boniel, her letters expressed a combination of sadness and irrepressible stubbornness. She confided her thoughts in letters to her dear friend the Countess Ortensia Stella. The king, she wrote, “has made me leave Lys to go to Avenay which is further from Paris by another 25 leagues, and where I am not well, as the air is awful and the place so deserted that one can have nothing that one wants. All this to get me to agree to return to
Rome—it is not the way. I have more aversion for Rome than for all the convents in France, as you know better than anyone.”
¹³
Marie was acutely aware of the danger that anyone in whom she confided might be acting in the interests of her husband. From the moment she and Hortense had left Rome, Lorenzo had focused on mustering a network of agents, spies, mediators, and supporters to help him pressure her to return or at least keep him informed of her intentions and movements. Ortensia was a person she trusted; another was Philippe. Before long her brother arrived in Avenay, to all appearances to rescue her, and he did not have difficulty persuading her to return with him to Nevers. Still, no sooner had they arrived that he informed her that he needed to go to Venice on business and that she had to find a convent in which to stay in his absence. Marie was surprised but compliant, asking only that she be allowed to stay in Lyon, where she could find a religious residence to her liking. This was in all likelihood the outcome Philippe had hoped for from the beginning, for he had been in secret correspondence with Lorenzo and had promised to get Marie close enough to the Italian border that she might be “persuaded” to return to Rome.

Marie was angry and hurt to discover that this was the stratagem. But she was learning to use her own tactics. She pretended to concede, wrote a letter to Lorenzo declaring that she would agree to return, and made a show of setting out for Italy in January 1673. In Chambéry she suddenly stopped. She requested that Hortense arrange to send a letter to Charles-Emmanuel asking for his protection. On this occasion, Hortense did not run away. She arranged for the delivery of the message and Marie was gratified to receive the duke's welcome in response. She continued her voyage southeast, not toward Rome, but toward Turin. Philippe, dismayed that he had failed in this attempt to please Lorenzo, who he had thought would inevitably be the victor in this dispute, was further surprised to learn that Louis XIV would not object to Marie's refuge in Savoy.
The king had sent a respectful message to Charles-Emmanuel, addressing him as his “brother” and declaring only that he assumed Marie would be working in Turin toward an accommodation with her husband: “I take joy in knowing that she has chosen a road leading her to a place where she can address her accommodation in person. You will give me great pleasure in exhorting her to attend to it as quickly as possible, as I am persuaded that this is the true road to happiness that I wish for her. I look forward to this sign of your friendship.”
¹⁴

Lorenzo's response to the news that Marie would be received in Turin was less friendly. He insisted angrily, if somewhat helplessly, that his wife at least be housed in a convent, a demand that both Marie and Charles-Emmanuel quickly agreed to, and so she settled for three months in apartments prepared for her in the Convent of the Visitation in Turin. This was not exactly the arrangement that Lorenzo had hoped for. Marie was free to come and go as she pleased, at first in the city and then eventually to Chambéry once again to see Hortense. But on this occasion Hortense was afraid to meet her.

Hortense had perhaps concluded that Marie's political position, like her own, was weakening. In any event, the reunion of the sisters was enough to panic both the French king and the Prince Colonna. Louis sent orders barring Marie from continuing toward France, and Lorenzo, frustrated and enraged, plotted to have her incarcerated somewhere that she could not so easily escape. Charles-Emmanuel at first was unruffled, and he whisked Marie away to his country hunting estate of La Veneria, but after another month he succumbed to what by now was heavy political pressure from both France and Italy. Reluctantly he escorted a resentful Marie back to her convent lodgings. He decided to make some effort to effect a reconciliation. The only way to do that, he was convinced, would be to get Lorenzo to come to talk to his wife. Lorenzo preferred to send more agents instead, demanding that they discern his wife's secret intentions and report to him.

This was a task that no one seemed able to accomplish. Who could say what Marie intended to do? Marie herself may not have known her own plans from day to day, except that she was determined to remain independent of her husband. She also was learning how to manipulate or mystify the spies her husband sent after her. It was useful to be spontaneous and unpredictable, even contradictory, when her freedom depended on hiding her intentions. After her failed effort to visit Hortense, even some of those closest to her were no longer in her confidence. Nanette De Rocour, one of the maidservants Lorenzo had sent to Marie, and who had remained with her through her travels, continued to send reports on her mistress's behavior to Lorenzo, as she was being paid to do. But she could not shed much light on it. Or maybe Marie and Nanette were collaborating and concocting false information to keep Lorenzo in the dark. Nanette wrote to him: