The Kings' Mistresses (25 page)

Further complicating matters, Marie's determined optimism had caused her to overestimate her own ability to find either friends who would welcome her in their homes or an abbess who would permit her to live in a convent from which she could come and go as she pleased. Spanish convents were not as congenial to taking in secular women as were those in France. But she stubbornly persisted in lobbying on her own behalf and found some allies in unlikely places, even among Colonna relatives who were as concerned about calming the family reputation as they were about satisfying Lorenzo's demands to have Marie shut up in a strict cloister or imprisoned. Gradually she began to obtain some favors from her husband's relatives, ever eager to minimize damage to their public image. She also curried favor with courtiers close to the royal family, many of them with ties to France, which was gaining increasing influence in the Spain of the 1670s. From behind the locked doors of her little house at the convent of Santo Domingo el Real, Marie
occupied herself with her writing. Mostly it was letters to Lorenzo, in which she continued to try to persuade him to send her their sons and to allow her to transfer to another house, one outside the convent walls. The queen, she assured him, had no objection to her plans: “You will see in her letter how she wants to comfort me and therefore awaits your approval [of] a house at some distance from the convent but with more space outside, where I could get more exercise and enjoy the cool of the evening; whereas here the nuns close the doors at 9:00 so that I cannot even go into the garden. What is more, the house where I am staying is extremely hot in the summer.”
¹³

Lorenzo did not immediately refuse her outright. He and the Countess Stella continued to send her the many small items she requested—cedar fans, perfume, laces, portraits of her sons, copies of portraits of herself that she could give as gifts—and Marie sent back gifts for everyone, especially the children: “The special mail will bring you a box with a black vase that the first lady-in-waiting gave me, and since it is highly considered I am offering it to you, together with some small tablets for burning and some little bowls and saucers for chocolate, one for each of the boys.”
¹⁴

By August it was clear that Lorenzo would not allow his sons to make the trip to Spain. Marie responded angrily, and yet continued to plead:

It was in this period, too, that Marie may have learned of the true nature of the relationship that had developed between Ortensia Stella and Lorenzo Colonna. Many years later, in his will, Lorenzo would acknowledge the two illegitimate children he had fathered with the Countess Stella. The first had been born in 1674, just before Marie's arrival in Madrid. Never in the long correspondence that Marie and the countess would maintain throughout their lives is there any sense of bitterness between the two women. Over the years Ortensia continued to serve Marie faithfully as a conduit to the Colonna household, interceding with Lorenzo and continuing to obtain his permission to send Marie a variety of requested items, from clothes to serving maids and pet dogs. On occasion, but not often, she also saw to it that Marie received promissory letters for delivery of some money, just enough to prevent the Colonna name from being tainted by the estranged wife's poverty. All these expenditures were meticulously recorded in Lorenzo's accounting notebooks. It would be the Countess Stella's signature that would continue to appear on the household records whenever items were withdrawn to be mailed to “Madama,” and it was to her friend that Marie would continue to confide her worries about her children, about Lorenzo's rejection of her requests, about gossip that might reach him. Ortensia had her own risks to face and her own calculations to make. Many years later, as we shall see, Marie would acknowledge that she understood them.

Sometime in 1675 Marie received a copy of the memoirs her sister had published in France. The printer, “Pierre de Marteau” of Cologne, was a familiar pseudonym used by many printers in France who wanted to publish a book that was likely to sell but that might get them in trouble with royal censors. The Duchess Mazarin's book was an exciting novelty, not only for the inside information it provided about the family of Cardinal Mazarin and
her own notoriously bad marriage, but also because it was a private memoir published by a woman who acknowledged her own authorship, something that had never been seen before in France. Manuscript and print copies were quickly circulated in several languages all over Europe and Britain. From Spain Marie read her sister's account of parts of her own life, including her romance with Louis XIV, her marriage, her years in Rome, and the adventures on the road the sisters had shared. Marie had become accustomed to being the subject of gossip, to being spied upon, and to having her movements documented by gazetteers and private agents, but it was a new experience to see herself as a subject in a book, described sympathetically by someone close to her who had risked her own reputation to write it. In the first lines of her memoirs, Hortense wrote that she was fully aware that to defend her own reputation was inherently impossible for a woman: “I know that a woman's glory lies in not giving rise to gossip,” but to remain unknown was not her destiny. “One cannot always choose the kind of life one wishes to lead, and there is fate even in the very things that seem to depend most on conduct.”
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The book was a sensation, provoking curiosity for more information about the runaway sisters. Within months another memoir appeared, also printed by “Pierre de Marteau,” titled
Memoirs of M.L.P.M.M., Grand Constabless of the Kingdom of Naples.
Its sales were no less successful than those of the first one, and this book, too, arrived in Madrid at the door of the lady by whom it was supposed to have been written.

Marie read it with astonishment. Clearly the author was someone who had known her life in Rome quite well, someone who could provide details of her daily occupations, her friends, her movements. The memoirs were prefaced by a letter signed only with the initials “N.N.,” claiming, in the conventional style of popular fiction, that the author had simply come into possession of the memoir: “I am sending you by express mail the Memoirs of Madame the Constabless
Colonna, so that they don't fall into anyone else's hands by the same accident that has put these and those of the Duchess Mazarin in your hands. These two sisters, having some connection in the disaster that has befallen their husbands, have also been fated to have similar accidents befall them.”
¹⁷
Marie continued to read: “As I saw in Rome a good number of the things that she recounts, I recognize the sincerity of her story.”
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As she delved further into these “memoirs” of her own life, her agitation grew. Who among those close to her had the audacity to assume her voice and to write of her life as though she herself were telling it? Worse, the telling of it was just convincing and plausible enough for readers to believe she herself had written it, but the image the memoir conveyed was not the one she would have chosen; it was not how she saw herself or how she wanted to be seen. Many of the facts of her life were either invented or distorted. The memoir itself started with her impersonator describing the “idleness” in which she was living in a Spanish convent and the timid reluctance with which she agreed to write the story of her life to comply with the request of a “noble” protector: “I could have no higher ambition than to acquire a protector such as you, whose merit knows no bounds.”
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The memoir went on to describe, in melodramatic terms laced with references to mythological figures, her thwarted romance with the young king: “And so it was that my unhappy destiny led me, who could have been a Venus, to be not even one of the Graces. My eyes fill with tears and my heart, choked with distress, stifles any happiness when I even think of it.”
²⁰
The fake memoirs described Marie as having become “too dangerous for the public good” once the king was betrothed, suggesting that she would have become a royal mistress after the marriage. Readers were told that she had to be married off to an “Argus” who would keep a close watch over her. Marie's impersonator had described her as taking pleasure in arousing her husband's jealousy, and Lorenzo
was characterized as being driven nearly mad with jealousy, accusing everyone from Marie's valets and servants to her brother of courting liaisons with his wife.

The book also liberally exposed the gossip and scandal that had circulated around Marie and Hortense in Rome, describing dramatic feuds between Hortense and her sister over the Courbeville affair and between Lorenzo and Marie over her relationship with the Chevalier de Lorraine. Marie is described as uncertain and helpless after her flight, wanting to follow her sister to England. Marie read on, about the many jealousies that Lorenzo had suffered on her account, about his suspicions of her liaisons with her musician Coresi and the Chevalier de Lorraine, and about her own quarrels with her husband over his amorous adventures with Roman ladies. This gossipy narrative was punctuated by pathetic expressions of regret and resignation, culminating with her impersonator's expressed desire to return “to France to be near the King,” and with her sad contemplation of the “thick walls” of the Madrid convent that now contained her, and her hope that she could “dig” her way out like famous prisoners had done.

This was too much for Marie. She wasted no time in taking up the battle against whatever damage the imposture had done, publishing her own version of her life's adventures, which she titled
The Truth in Its Own Light; or, The Genuine Memoirs of M. Mancini, Constabless Colonna
. And so she joined Hortense in her move to go public with her life and attempt to reclaim her reputation. In the first paragraph she took on her detractors and decried the lucrative book market that encouraged writers to produce such calumny:

Lorenzo Colonna had seen the first memoir, and a manuscript copy had been translated into Italian for him. We do not know how he reacted to it, but it is clear that Marie felt that her life story in her own words could only be better received by him, for she sent him her own manuscript even before it was printed and was eager to receive his impression of it. She explained to him that it was important to correct the image that the first version had created, declaring in a letter that “I have been obliged (to counter the ridiculous and impertinent story that is circulating under my name) to give to the printer a true relation of my life.”
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She included, often briefly but suggestively, even episodes in her life that he might have preferred to see passed over in silence, including her romance with Louis XIV. On this moment in her life she stated forthrightly, “As far as the king is concerned I could not have explained myself in less detail, because we are dealing with such a public event that it would be worse to keep silent about it.”
²³
Describing the romance, she recounted episodes illustrating the king's “kindness,” his chivalry, and “the indulgence with which he treated me in everything.”
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Marie had been particularly angered by the fake memoir's closing scene, which described her situation in Madrid. There she was depicted as a virtual prisoner, pining away behind impenetrable stone walls and pathetically fantasizing about how she might dig herself out. By contrast, she ended her own memoir with a pointed objection to this sort of representation of both her character and her situation. She insisted on the ease with which she had escaped any such efforts to contain her, starting with her unauthorized sorties from the convent: