Part 2

In this age of the emancipation of women it is amusing to read of the grave scandal the Duchesse de Mazarin caused by leaving her husband. Such an action, which to-day would scarcely cause a ripple of excitement, was then a criminal offence. It was the first step in defiance of convention that gave her freedom and deprived her of her reputation. But, considering the life she had led, the wonder is not that she did not leave her husband sooner, but that she had ever put up with him at all. Arguing, perhaps, from her indolent and easy-going temperament, which, because it had endured for seven years the vagaries of such a husband, seemed to prove an unlimited capacity of endurance, she was pestered by the Duc, her relations, and even the King himself, to return to the Palais Mazarin. But she refused to listen to all offers of reconciliation and mediation. Any fate, she declared, was preferable to living again under the same roof with her husband. He, in his exasperation, seized the power the law gave him and had her arrested and imprisoned in the convent of Les Filles de St. Marie, a sort of aristocratic home for fallen women. The Duchesse, now as alert and vindictive as she had previously been indolent and submissive, retorted from her convent-prison with a demand for her jewels, an allowance, and a separation.

As usual in a scandal of this sort, the sympathy of society was divided between the husband and the wife. For while there was no excuse for the absurd and irritating behaviour of the Duc de Mazarin, there was no doubt but that the Duchesse herself was not above reproach. The looseness of her later life is of itself a sufficient warrant for the suspicion that the corruption associated with her name was of early origin. We read of strange flirtations before her marriage, one with a handsome eunuch attached to the household of her uncle, the Cardinal; of a duel fought over her by servants; of visits paid her by the King; and of the charge brought against her by her husband of too close an intimacy with the Duc de Nevers, her poetising, godless brother--a charge which she passionately resented and denied, which we, personally, do not know whether to credit or not, and which of itself was a justifiable cause for separation.

While the case between her husband and herself was pending, Madame de Mazarin made the most of her imprisonment. Philosophic resignation is nothing to the airy indifference with which she appeared to regard her situation. Perhaps this unrepentant frame of mind could have found its vindication, if it required one, in nothing more likely to encourage it than the companionship of a young and fascinating woman who was also a prisoner at Les Filles de St. Marie. Even more talked about at this period than the Duchesse de Mazarin herself was Sidonie de Lenoncourt, Marquise de Courcelles, who was also the victim of an insupportable husband. This "Manon Lescaut of the seventeenth century," as she has been wittily called, deserves a word or two, not so much on her own account as on account of the light she casts on certain phases of the social life of her day.

Born heiress of a noble family, Sidonie, who had lost both parents in her infancy, was brought up by an old aunt, an abbess of Orleans. When she was fifteen the orphan, who was as innocent as she was beautiful, was suddenly removed from the pure life of the abbey at Orleans, by order of the King, whose ward she was, and placed at the Hôtel de Soissons, then the centre of the gayest and loosest society in Paris. The instigator of this spiritual seduction was Colbert, who, wishing to enrich and ennoble his family, conceived the idea of marrying the heiress to his brother. But at the Hôtel de Soissons the lovely Sidonie fired all sorts of ambitions. If Colbert coveted her name and wealth, Louvois lusted for her person. During the intrigues to which she was exposed she was married off-hand to the Marquis de Courcelles, a man devoid of all principle, who helped to corrupt her on purpose on the day of her ruin to get complete possession of her fortune. Surrounded by such pitfalls, it is not surprising that Sidonie fell, and fell noisily. To escape the thought of her villain of a husband, the girl flung herself into the arms of Louvois. This powerful Minister was able to protect her from the designs of de Courcelles for a time, but she sought consolation elsewhere, and got herself so talked and written about in the lampoons that deluged Paris and were said to "temper despotism," that her husband had no trouble in getting an order from the King to shut her up at Les Filles de St. Marie.

No worse influence could have come into the life of the freshly emancipated and besmirched Duchesse de Mazarin than this captivating young adultress, whose misfortunes, though unworthy of sympathy, won it and admiration as well, by reason of the gaiety with which they were borne. "The pleasure of remaining innocent does not make up for the pain of being continually browbeaten and insulted," she said--an opinion to which the Duchesse was only too ready to agree. For three months these two were inseparable. Although Sidonie was the younger, a mere child, she was the more experienced, the cleverer. It was she who instigated the Duchesse to kill the tedium of imprisonment by filling the nuns' holy-water stoup with ink, putting wet sheets on their beds, letting loose dogs in their dormitory, and by perpetrating practical jokes continually.

At last the unfortunate nuns pleaded to be relieved of such intolerable charges. The Duchesse was transferred to another convent to await the settlement of her case, while Sidonie was herself shortly after released and went back to her husband, and more adventures. Escaping from one convent in which she was afterwards imprisoned, she met a young man who fell in love with her at sight and joined her in her flight. But she ran away from him too in the end, and many another, and finished sadly enough. The Abbé Prévost might, indeed, have taken her for the model of his Manon Lescaut. To see Sidonie was to adore her, and she was not without an agreeable wit, as her poor little memoirs, which she found time to write, testify. "I am tall," she wrote, in her gay way that suggests a wink of the eye, "I have a good figure, the best possible deportment, fine hair, and a beautiful complexion, although pitted in a couple of places by small-pox. My eyes are big, and I never open them completely, which, though an affectation, gives them a very sweet and tender expression. I have not much to boast of in the shape of my mouth, but my teeth are like pearls. Hands exquisite, arms passable--that is to say, they are rather thin--but I find compensation for this defect in knowing that my legs are perfect." Poor little Sidonie!

At length the Duchesse de Mazarin's suit for separation and an allowance was settled in her favour. She returned to the Palais Mazarin, and the Duc took up his abode at the Arsenal. But it was merely a truce. M. de Mazarin appealed, and fearing lest she might once more fall into his hands, the Duchesse, who had tasted liberty, aided by a friend of her brother's, the Chevalier de Rohan, fled in male attire, accompanied by her maid similarly disguised and two men-servants. The Duc de Mazarin wormed a _lettre de cachet_ out of the reluctant King, and had his wife hotly chased. The fugitives, however, succeeded in getting out of the country in safety, and had a series of adventures that are very suggestive of Dumas. No one ever fled with a lighter heart or more casually, so to speak, than the Duchesse de Mazarin; and no one ever more thoroughly entered into the spirit of adventure than she.

At Neuchâtel they took her for the Duchesse de Longueville, the celebrated heroine of the Fronde, and she received an embarrassing ovation. Only Madame de Longueville, they said, went about dressed as a man. At a small garrison town in the Alps "we were all liked to be knocked on the head, owing to our ignorance of the language," and on arriving at the village of Altdorf, on Lake Lucerne, the party were quarantined for forty days, on account of the indisposition of the Duchesse, caused by an injury to her knee received some days before. In this wretched little village she says that a farrier was the local surgeon, and that it was only with the greatest difficulty he could be got to agree that it would not be necessary to amputate her leg. Finally Milan was reached, where the Constable Colonna and his wife, Marie Mancini, the Duchesse's sister, were waiting to receive her.

At Paris the scandal caused by this flight was the talk of the town and the Court; the reputation of the Duchesse de Mazarin was torn to shreds. She considered her freedom, however, cheap at the price, and, joined by her brother, the Duc de Nevers, she and the Colonnas spent several months touring about Italy. This delightful jaunt was but a lull in the cyclone that had swept her into Italy, and was to sweep her back to France. At Rome, where she hoped to make her residence, humiliations as insupportable as any she had known in the Palais Mazarin awaited her. Penniless and _déclassée_, the beautiful fugitive was an embarrassing incubus to her Roman relations. They passed her on from one to the other, snubbing and quarrelling with her, till at last, reduced to pawning her "little" jewels, as she called them, to distinguish them from her "big" ones still in the Duc de Mazarin's hands, she decided that the fire from which she had escaped was preferable to the frying-pan into which she had fallen. So, accompanied by her brother, who was returning to marry a niece of Madame de Montespan, she went back to France with the intention of throwing herself on the mercy of her husband. Like true Mancinis, they spent six months on the journey. In the meantime the Duc de Mazarin, warned of his wife's intention, took the course that might have been expected of him.

On arriving at the Château de Nevers, the Duchesse found the park infested with police, who had orders to arrest her and imprison her in the Abbey of Lys. But her relations were active at Court as well as her husband, and within a week the King, whose playmate she had been as a child, sent a company of dragoons to force the doors of her prison and release her. And to the mortification of her husband, and the astonishment of society, Madame de Mazarin entered Paris in the carriage of Colbert, and had an audience of Louis. The King, who arrogated to himself the right to arbitrate in the domestic squabbles of his subjects, high and low, tried to induce the Duc de Mazarin to take his wife back, but at this suggestion the emancipated Duchesse replied wittily but firmly with the cry of the Fronde: "_Point de Mazarin! Point de Mazarin!_" The King, however, concluded an arrangement, much to the stingy Duc's despair, by which Madame de Mazarin was to return to Italy on an allowance from her husband, as long as she remained out of the country, of 24,000 francs a year--a sum inadequate enough for one whose _dot_ had been the greatest in Europe!

"She will eat it at the first inn she comes to," remarked the courtier Lauzun cynically.

In much less time than it had taken her to reach France from Rome, Madame de Mazarin found herself back in the Eternal City, and once more under the roof of her sister, Madame la Connétable. Much had transpired in the Palazzo Colonna since her departure. The Constable and his wife were no longer on friendly terms. The Constable had become faithless and cruel, while Madame la Connétable was in bad odour in Roman society on her own account--mixed bathing in the Tiber, Madame la Connétable in a gauze bathing costume, and the Chevalier de Lorraine all but living in the Palazzo Colonna! When the Duchesse arrived on the scene she found her sister, egged on by the Chevalier, the handsomest and most disreputable man of his century, and whose wit, vices, and exploits are plentifully sprinkled through its literature, bent on flight. At first, seeing in such a proposition fresh trouble for herself, she tried to smooth matters. But her efforts proving ineffectual, and perhaps also from a love of further adventures, she finally determined to aid and accompany her sister.

One night, when the Constable was visiting at a country house near Rome, Madame la Connétable and the Duchesse de Mazarin donned men's clothes and, attended by their maids in similar apparel, drove off in a coach to Civita Vecchia. They arrived there at two in the morning and, not finding the fishing-boat they had engaged beforehand, were obliged to wait till dawn in a wood without the town. "The coachman," says the Duchesse in her memoirs, "having hunted high and low without finding our boat, was fain to hire another, which he got for a thousand crowns. While he was thus employed the postilion becoming impatient took one of the coach-horses and had the luck to meet with our boat, but it was late when he came back, and we were obliged to walk five miles on foot and go on board about three in the afternoon without having eaten or drunk since we left Rome. We had the luck to fall in with a very honest captain; for, as it was easy to see that we were women and not beggars, any other but he would have murdered us and thrown us overboard. His crew asked us 'if we had not killed the Pope?'" In eight days these two extraordinary _grandes dames_ disembarked from their fishing-smack at the little port of Ciotat, near Marseilles, whither they went on horseback, after one of the most thrilling journeys the Duchesse de Mazarin ever took. For their boat had been nearly lost in a storm and chased by Turkish pirates; the latter was a peril perhaps less terrifying to them than shipwreck, as it would have meant a new series of adventures.

At Marseilles they were met by the Chevalier de Lorraine and another dazzling reprobate, and the four, who had no longer any reputations to lose--for, as the Duchesse says, "there was no fable horrible enough to be invented by the wickedness of man but was reported of us"--set out light-heartedly on a tour through Provence. The ladies, still wearing men's clothes, which mightily became them, at length reached Aix-les-Bains. Here their rank and unparalleled adventures afforded them the reception curiosity always offers to unconventionality--if it is feminine and beautiful. Some were for whipping them at a cart's wheel, others for putting them in a lunatic asylum; while Madame de Grignan, the wife of the governor, sent them proper clothing with the message "that they travelled like true heroines of romance, with abundance of jewels but no clean linen," and wrote to her mother, Madame de Sévigné, that their beauty was divine. Their stay at Aix, however, was but of short duration, for the approach of the Duc de Mazarin's police agents so alarmed the Duchesse that she abandoned her sister and slipped across the frontier to Chambéry, where one of her former suitors, now become the reigning Duke of Savoy, afforded her his protection.

As for Madame la Connétable, she soon after fell into the hands of her ruthless Constable, who shut her up in various convents, from which she was always escaping, only to be caught again. Her last prison was a convent in Madrid, where she passed the greater part of her life--an imprisonment, however, nominal rather than real, for we find her frequently at the Spanish Court festivities. Madame de Villars, who saw her there, wrote to a friend in France that "she was even more beautiful at forty than at twenty, when Louis XIV. had loved her." But she was never happy. Of a different temperament from her sister Hortense, Marie Mancini had not the _bravade_ necessary to conquer the hostility of the world. She could never live down her past, and finding herself free at the death of her husband, who begged her pardon in his will for the misery he had caused her, she returned to Italy, only to meet everywhere with a cold reception. History is not quite clear as to her last years, but it is believed that her children, at any rate, forgave her, as there is a monument to her memory in the cathedral at Pisa, where she died.

For the first time in her career the fates were really kind now to the Duchesse de Mazarin. In Savoy she found the peace and quiet that her naturally indolent temperament craved, and for three years the infatuated Duke supported her in luxury at his Court. Pleasure, of which she was ever a devotee, was agreeably tempered by a taste for literature, art, and philosophy, which she developed at this time. Nor was love abandoned. She shared her heart between the unexacting Duke and a certain César Vischard. It was to the latter that she dictated her memoirs during her stay in Savoy, and as he played for a time a rather important part in her life a word about him will not be amiss.

The Abbé de St. Réal, as he called himself, though never consecrated, was a _chevalier d'industrie_ with a literary bent. Among his works, which had a certain ephemeral popularity, were a romance entitled "Don Carlos," which Schiller afterwards made use of for the stage, and a "Vie de Jésus." But he was best celebrated at the time and remembered now for the profligacy of his career. He may be said to have plumbed the bottomless pit of vice, and some of his letters which were intercepted by the agents of the Minister Louvois, whom Forneron says was a _connoisseur_ in indecency, made even him shudder. Such was the man whom Madame de Mazarin now admitted to the closest intimacy, and with whom, on the sudden death of the Duke, she fled from Savoy to escape the vengeance of the jealous Duchess.

"I learnt on arriving here," wrote from Geneva her whilom friend, the Marquise de Courcelles, with whom she had fallen out before her first flight from France, "that Madame de Mazarin had some days ago gone to Germany, I believe to Augsburg, and that because the Duchess of Savoy, immediately after the death of her husband, had ordered her out of the country. How miserable it must be for her to see herself hunted from place to place! But what is uncommon is that this woman triumphs over disgrace by follies that have no parallel, and that after having tasted shame she thinks only of enjoying herself. When passing through here she was on horseback dressed as a man and with twenty men in her suite, talking only of music and hunting and everything that suggests pleasure."

In such costume and company she arrived at Amsterdam with the lightest of hearts after passing through countries aflame with war. As if she had taken the idea to visit her former suitors in turn, she decided upon going to England, which she reached in the month of December, 1675, and where she was destined to remain till her death in 1699, twenty-four years later. The real motive of the greatest heiress in Europe, now become a pure adventuress, in going to England was, no doubt, to lay siege to the heart of Charles II. But her ostensible motive was to visit her cousin by marriage, Mary of Modena, whom she had met when that princess passed through Savoy on her way to marry the Duke of York, and with whom she had struck up a friendship. The Duchess of York, as she expected, welcomed her warmly. Charles II. fell an instant victim to her charms, and she entered London society with unprecedented _éclat_.

She was now thirty, and of the fourteen years since her marriage she had passed seven principally on the highway dressed as a man. This life, which would have broken the health of any other woman, had agreed with her wonderfully. Her appearance on her arrival in London may be imagined by the following description by Forneron: "The Duchesse de Mazarin was one of those Roman beauties in whom there is no doll-prettiness, and in whom unaided nature triumphs over all the arts of the coquette. Painters could not say what was the colour of her eyes. They were neither blue nor grey, nor yet black nor brown nor hazel. Nor were they languishing nor passionate, as if either demanding to be loved or expressing love. They simply looked as if she had basked in love's sunshine. If her mouth were not large, it was not a small one, and was suitably the fit organ for intelligent speech and amiable words. All her motions were charming in their easy grace and dignity. Her complexion was softly toned and yet warm and fresh. It was so harmonious that though dark she seemed of beautiful fairness. Her jet-black hair rose in strong waves above her forehead, as if proud to clothe and adorn her splendid head. She did not use scent." Though fond of it, he might have added, and unlike her uncle the Cardinal, who was always perfumed like the garden of Armida.

Ruvigny, the French Ambassador, wrote to Louis: "She is to all appearances a finely developed young girl. I never saw any one who so well defies the power of time and vice to disfigure. When she arrives at the age of fifty she will have the satisfaction of thinking when she looks in the mirror that she is as lovely as she ever was in her life."

King Charles, in that characteristic way that made him most popular when most undeserving popularity, gave this superb beauty apartments in St. James's Palace and a pension of four thousand pounds sterling a year. The ball was at the feet of the adventuress. She at once became the centre of State intrigues, a party was formed around her. She saw herself on the point of dethroning, not the Queen, but the favourite, the all-powerful Duchess of Portsmouth. The corruption of the Court had reached the Parliament, and tinged even the patriotism of the people. The Duchess of Mazarin was chosen by Protestant England as the means of ridding the country from the harlot who had made it the satellite of France. They accepted her as the avenging champion; she at least was above-board and never resorted to trick or artifice. The situation is one of the most extraordinary spectacles in English history. Louis XIV. became alarmed. Ruvigny, honest Huguenot, was not the man to succeed in threading the maze of the foul diplomatic labyrinth in which he suddenly found himself by the success of the Duchesse de Mazarin. He suggested that, as the star of the Duchess of Portsmouth appeared to be declining, the French Court should throw her over and make terms with her rival. But the shrewd French Court was unwilling to desert a harlot whom they could trust for a harlot who had a grievance against them.

Ruvigny was replaced by the crafty Courtin, one of Louis' ablest servants. Before going to England he went to see the Duc de Mazarin in the hope of ingratiating himself with that Tartuffe-ridden man, as well as the nation to which he was accredited, by bringing the Duchesse news that her plea for a fitting maintenance, strongly backed by Charles to Louis, was heard. But he little understood the man he had to deal with. The Duc de Mazarin, thoroughly unable to admit that he had ever given the least cause for the scandalous conduct of his wife, demanded that she should return to France and suffer herself to be incarcerated in a convent. The answer of Madame de Mazarin, who was living sumptuously at St. James's and the object of almost universal admiration, was such as might have been expected.