The Kings' Mistresses (8 page)

Being all too familiar with Armand-Charles's obsessions, she was prepared for the devastating consequences that her formal request to separate their common property had for her already fragile relations with him. Before her husband had heard of the measures she had taken, she left the Mazarin palace to take shelter at her sister Olympe's residence, where she remained while Jean-Baptiste Colbert considered how to deny her request and mediate a reconciliation. After two months she was ordered to return to her husband,
while Armand-Charles was told to allow his wife to select her own servants and to stop forcing her to employ maids of his choosing, whom he had enlisted as spies. But this truce was broken almost immediately. The duke refused to allow his wife to leave, screaming at his servants to lock all the doors whenever she tried to venture out, even on foot (he had already locked up her carriage). When the terrified servants moved out of her way he tried to physically restrain her himself, though, she reported, unsuccessfully: “Monsieur Mazarin . . . threw himself in front of me and pushed me very roughly, in order to block my way; but my grief and vexation gave me extraordinary strength, and I broke through even though he was strong, too.”
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It was clear that the household was irreconcilable. Armand-Charles resorted to his habitual demand that she leave the capital with him for an extended stay in Alsace. This time Hortense's friends were more blunt than usual in their warnings to her. “After what has happened, you would be a fool to expect to come back from there,” they told her, “where his actions would not be open to public scrutiny as they are in Paris, and where we would no longer be able to do anything for you but send useless wishes.”
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Hortense once again took refuge with Olympe, and when Armand-Charles arrived to take her with him, she refused to leave. The duke responded by giving her two choices of places where he would permit her to reside in his absence: the Notre-Dame-des-Chelles convent, about ten miles outside of Paris, where one of his relatives was the abbess, or the residence of Hortense's older cousin Anne-Marie, married to the Prince of Conti, a close friend of the duke and, like him, a convert to Catholic extremism. Forced to choose between what she called “two equally odious propositions,” Hortense chose the convent. She stayed at Chelles through the summer of 1667, when once again the duke demanded that she accompany him on a voyage, this time to his ancestral village in Brittany. Once again
his wife refused, and this time the duke appealed to the king for support. Louis XIV partially acceded to the duke's wishes and ordered Hortense to move to another convent, this one of the Order of the Visitation on the rue Saint-Antoine, where the duke believed she would be under closer supervision.

The duchess was infuriated by this royal order, which came shortly after she had made it known to both Louis XIV and Colbert that she was preparing a legal case to recover control of the wealth she had inherited. Believing that her maniacal husband was squandering the fortune to which she and her four children were entitled, the Duchess Mazarin found herself escorted by royal armed guard to be incarcerated in a Parisian convent that also served as a prison for wayward noblewomen. Her situation was desperate.

One of the other unfortunate women being kept under lock and key at the Convent of the Visitation was Marie-Sidonie de Courcelles, a seventeen-year-old whose husband had brought a legal suit against her for adultery. The Marquise de Courcelles was a stubborn and resilient young woman who knew something about how to navigate the labyrinth of courts and patrons that constituted the legal system. She was building a case in her own defense, drawing upon personal contacts while also negotiating for her cause to be heard by sympathetic judges. The marquise would later write her own memoirs, in which she expressed her anger at the legal predicament faced by wayward wives who were imprisoned for adultery while noblemen were simply exiled from the court for far more serious offenses. Hortense was consoled and delighted to find herself in the marquise's company. Not only did the young marquise, who had some powerful friends at court, offer to assist the duchess in her legal challenge to her husband, but she also was, Hortense observed admiringly, “very attractive and very amusing.”
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For these two, finding themselves together in a convent was a predicament to resist through mockery. They flaunted their youth and energy
before the elderly nuns who had been assigned to watch them. “Under the pretext of keeping us company, the sisters were keeping us under surveillance,” Hortense wrote. “We soon exhausted them all one after another, until two or three of them sprained their ankles striving to keep up with us.”
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Stories of their pranks and their resilience made the rounds of the Paris salons and the court, garnering the women sympathy. An anonymous poet circulated a popular verse declaring that until the two were liberated, there would be no laughter among the ladies of Paris.
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It was not long before the nuns tired of their roles as jail keepers and were only too happy to see the two friends win a formal request to be transferred together to Chelles.

Governed by an aunt of Duke Mazarin, Chelles was already familiar to Hortense, who earlier had chosen to stay there rather than be confined in the household of the Prince de Conti. To her surprise, during her first stay she had found her husband's aunt to be sympathetic to her. The Chelles abbey, Hortense learned, had a long history of powerful women who had governed both the abbey and the community surrounding it. Residents of the convent traditionally had been permitted to own and manage properties, and the abbess had complete autonomy in governing the community. In its nearly thousand-year history, many generations of royal women had chosen to “retire” there. Armand-Charles was not particularly pleased to learn of the decision to send his wife back to Chelles, but when he demanded that the abbess return his wife to him, he was refused.

This was a show worth watching. It must have been especially gratifying to female observers, for whom the threat of being locked up in a convent was routinely held over them from childhood anytime they dared to go against the wishes of father or husband. Hortense and Marie-Sidonie were both in desperate situations with little hope of resolution based on legal precedent. But they flaunted their
gaiety and their ability to escape the grasp of their persecutors. They certainly feared what would happen to them if they managed to return to the outside world without permission, but they were determined to let the world know they could escape. They received visitors, with whom they chatted through the metal grille separating the nuns from the convent parlor. One day, hearing a commotion outside and fearing that the Duke Mazarin had arrived with an armed guard to move Hortense to a more secure prison, they managed to actually squeeze their thin bodies between the bars of the grille. Hortense later remembered the pleasure the two of them took in imagining this adventure as a rehearsal for their eventual escape: “In the grille of our parlor there was a hole big enough for a large tray, through which we had never imagined before then that a person might be able to pass. And yet we both got through it, but it was such a tight fit that Monsieur Mazarin himself, if he had been in the convent, would never have suspected it and would have looked for us everywhere but in that parlor.”
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News of the convent escapades of the marquise and the duchess made the rounds in Paris, providing not only a source of entertainment but also fodder for public discussions concerning the legal rights of husbands over their wives. In the eyes of the law and of marriage contracts, women were regarded as their husbands' property. But challenges to this status were being vigorously argued in many forms, from popular fiction to legal dossiers. For decades the writer and philosopher Madeleine de Scudéry had been arguing against marriage and its power to enslave women. “Those whom Nature or custom gave as our masters want us to extinguish in our souls the lights Heaven put there and to live in the deepest shadows of ignorance,” she had written in 1653.
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Legal debates over the status of married women as property were quickly absorbed in public conversations. In 1667, when Hortense and Marie-Sidonie were in the Convent of the Visitation in Paris, everyone was following
the efforts of another particularly prominent unhappy wife, Marie de Savoie Nemours, to extricate herself from a miserable marriage. Her drunken and violent husband was Alphonse VI, king of Portugal. Marie had fled less than a year after her marriage, taking refuge in a convent. By early 1668 she was negotiating for a papal dispensation to have her marriage annulled. She was successful, and in April she married Dom Pedro of Portugal, her former brother-in-law, who overthrew Alphonse and had himself declared regent.

The contemporary legal struggles of rebellious women were on the mind of the feminist writer Poullain de la Barre when he condemned lawyers who “place women under the tutelage of their husbands, like children vis-à-vis their fathers, and say that it is nature that has assigned them the basest occupations in society and has placed public positions out of their reach.”
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Marie-Sidonie and Hortense both threw themselves into the task of appealing to the courts for legal separations that would provide them with income to live independently. Legal opinion was as divided as the public on these issues. With the marquise's encouragement, Hortense submitted her first appeal to the Court of Requests in Paris, and the young judges who constituted this judicial body handed down an encouraging decision, authorizing the duchess to return to the Mazarin palace and ordering her husband to take up residence, for the time being, in the Arsenal of Paris (he was, after all, grand master of the artillery), provide his wife with a pension of 20,000 livres per annum, and produce the documents she had requested showing how he was disposing of their fortune.

For a brief moment, Hortense felt triumphant. “The Chamber was composed almost entirely of very reasonable young men,” she declared, “and there was not a single one of them who did not strive to serve me.”
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But she knew that Armand-Charles would not simply settle for the decision and would instead launch himself into the battle even more energetically in public than he had in private.
The duke appealed the lower court's decision to the more senior Grand Chamber of judges, hoping for an outcome that would be more favorable to him. And he waited, furious, as Hortense returned to public life, to court festivities, and to company that included Marie-Sidonie, who had won temporary permission to move from the convent to the Mazarin palace. When Hortense resumed hosting productions in a small theater she had constructed in her wing of the palace, Armand-Charles could no longer contain himself. One day when his wife was absent, he had the theater demolished.

It was clear that the duke had no intention of respecting the terms of the couple's authorized separation. The king, who did not relish intervening in marital quarrels, was nevertheless persuaded that the duke's official exclusion from his own residence was too harsh, and while everyone was waiting for the final judgment of the Grand Chamber, he overrode that particular provision of the Court of Request's decision. Hortense was further dismayed by Marie-Sidonie's apparent reconciliation with her own husband. This was bad timing; it seemed to hold out a model for the Mazarin couple, one that the duchess was determined not to follow. The two friends quarreled, and Hortense committed a serious indiscretion by informing the Marquis de Courcelles that his wife was receiving secret visits from the young Marquis de Cavoye. Courcelles decided to avenge himself and the result was a predawn duel between the two men in the Marais district, not far from the Mazarin palace. Both Courcelles and his opponent, though uninjured, were thrown into the Conciergerie prison for such a blatant violation, in the heart of the city, of the royal interdiction against dueling, and Cavoye would remain in prison for two full years. Meanwhile, public opinion toward the young duchess started to cool.

Hortense was mortified. Making matters worse, at around the same time, one of her pages was seriously wounded in a street brawl, and it was whispered that somehow the duchess had arranged the
incident to prevent the young man from giving up a secret that would have damaged her reputation and her legal case. In the public eye, she realized, she was losing her innocence. “Everyone at court called me a troublemaker and accused me of brutality toward this worthy subject,” she wrote, “saying ‘that I would do my best to get plenty of others slaughtered too.'”
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In a somewhat desperate move, she decided that the best course of action would be to appeal directly to the king for solidarity and sympathy. She made an appearance at court accompanied by Olympe, who immediately attempted to make light of their visit by saying to the king, “I am bringing you that criminal, that wicked woman, of whom so much ill is being said.” Louis promptly replied, “I never believed a word of it.” “But,” Hortense later noted, “he said it so succinctly, and in a manner so different from the openness with which he was in the habit of treating me, that anyone other than I would have seen cause to doubt whether he was telling the truth.”
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It was early May 1668, only five months after the Court of Requests had awarded the Duchess Mazarin a favorable decision. But this judgment that she had hoped would provide her with protection from her husband was fragile. The Court of Requests was only one of several judicial chambers, or parlements, that might hear her case, and she knew that Armand-Charles would pursue his suit against her with another chamber. She also needed public opinion on her side, and in particular the support of the royal court. Although she did not lack confidence, and though she did have many supporters, her position was now uncomfortably reminiscent of the one in which she and Marie-Sidonie had pushed and pulled each other through the grille of the convent to escape the unwelcome arrival of Duke Mazarin: she was managing, but it was a tight squeeze. In the middle of May, Hortense received a visit from a highly placed friend who gave her sobering news about her husband's countersuit: “The Duke controls the Grand Chamber, his
cabal is all-powerful there, he will obtain whatever ruling he desires, and even if you were awarded the separation of property you are requesting, they will surely revoke the physical separation that you have won.”
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Of the two types of legal separation that were possible,
séparation de corps
(physical separation) and
séparation de biens
(separation of assets), it was the former that Hortense was determined to retain at all cost. “Just imagine,” she thought, “what treatment I could expect from Monsieur Mazarin, if I returned to him under the force of a legal ruling, with the court and the Parlement against me.”
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