The Nieces of Mazarin

I.

SAINTE-BEUVE has said: “There are two ‘ ages ’ of Louis XIV. : the one, noble, majestic, magnificent, respectable, conventional to stiffness, decorous to solemnity, represented by the king in person, by his official orators and poets, by Bossuet, Racine, Despréaux ; another there is, that, so to speak, flows beneath this, as a river flows under a great bridge, and forms the communication between the two regencies, —that of the queen-mother and that of Philippe d’Orléans. The beautiful and brilliant nieces of Mazarin had a great share in this transmission of character from one regency to the other, the Duchesses of Mazarin and of Bouillon and all their world,” — a world which included, or at least was in sympathy with, that of Saint-Evremond. the familiar friend of the Duchess of Mazarin (during the last half of her life), and the lovers of pleasure of his kind, and those who belonged to the intellectual circle of the remarkable Ninon de 1’Enclos.

It is not only from this point of view that the characters of these women become of interest, but also because from them descended the last Stuarts, the last Vendômes, the last Contis, the last legitimate prince of the house of Este, Dukes of Modena, and members of other great families of France and of Italy.¹ This gives to them an added importance, while a singular personal attraction clings to the memory of many of them. “ The Mazarin blood,” as Ninon herself generously declared, “ is the very wellspring of charm.”

These seven charming women were sisters and cousins of one another: there were five of the Mancini family and two of the Martinozzi; and the ages of the oldest and the youngest differed by ten years only. From the incidents of their respective lives, it may be inferred that the Mancini blood was hotter than the Martinozzi, and the Princesse de Conti, Anne Marie Martinozzi, stands apart from the group, shining with pure sweetness. Her sister, too, and also Laure Mancini, the eldest of the Mancini, seem not to have had the terrible instincts of audacity of the younger troop ; but Laure died young, and her short life was checkered by the reverses of fortune of her paternal cardinal-uncle.

It was in 1647 that Mazarin imported from Rome Laure and Olympe Mancini, the one eleven, the other ten, years of age, and Anne Marie Martinozzi, also ten. These three first-comers of the band came when their uncle was in his most triumphant glory. He affected to be himself little interested in the matter, and put the business of receiving them into the hands of an undistinguished courtier, the Comte de Nogent. But it was remarked that in selecting him for this office he had chosen a man who carried flattery to an extreme, and who would be eager to pay the little girls all possible honor, while the crafty cardinal could always make light of it by saying, “ C’est l’humeur du personnage,” ami could turn his doings into ridicule with the queen (Anne of Austria), if he thought best. Such is the shrewd Madame de Motteville’s view of the situation.

The children, by the queen’s desire, were brought to her the evening they arrived; and Madame de Motteville says : —

“ When this uncle, so revered, so fortunate, and so powerful, saw his nieces arrive, he quitted the queen as soon as they entered her cabinet, and went home to go to bed. After they had seen the queen, they were taken to him ; but he had not the air of caring much about them ; on the contrary, he jested at those who were foolish enough to pay attention to them : yet, notwithstanding this seeming disregard, it is certain that he had great designs about these little girls. All his indifference on the subject was but pure acting, and we may judge by this that it is not always at the theatre that the best pieces are played.” the next morning they were seen by the court in general, and every effort was made by the spectators to consider them charming and beautiful, — “ that they were clever was inferred from their faces ” (on leur donna de Vesprit par les yeux).—and everything of the nature of praise was freely distributed to them in this liberal mood. " While the courtiers were eagerly talking about them,” continues Madame de Motteville, " the Due d’Orléans [Gaston] approached the Abbé de la Riviére and me, who were conversing in a window, and said to us in a low tone, ‘ There are so many people around these little girls that I doubt whether their lives are safe, and whether they will not be smothered by being stared at. The Maréchal de Villeroi drew near at the same time, and with his ministerial seriousness said to the duke, ‘ There we see some little ladies, who now are not rich, but who very soon will have fine castles and large incomes, beautiful jewels and splendid services of silver, and perhaps great positions.’ ” The prophecy came true, as we know ; but not without an intervening period when it would scarcely have been uttered.

The cardinal gave the charge of his nieces to Madame de Senecy, who had been the gouvernante of the little king. It was said at first that she was more proud of this honor than the other; but the insecurity of her dignity was set before her when, in the early days of the troubles of the first Fronde, the cardinal said to her one evening (June 30, 1648), before all the court, affecting humility, that he begged her to treat them as simple demoiselles ; that he knew not what the future held, either for himself or for them. In fact, it was only a year and a day precisely from the reception at court of the little girls that the king, and the queen-mother, and the cardinal left Paris in haste and retired to SaintGermain, retreating before the advancing and daily - strengthening Fronde. The three little girls were at this time sent out of the way to the Sisters of Val-de-Grâce. But when, in 1651, the cardinal found himself obliged to leave France, his nieces also were expelled by decree of Parliament. They had by this time become of consequence, both in the eyes of the political leaders who had already been scheming for and against them, and also in the eyes of the common people ; and one of the versified chronicles of the day narrates the search made for them by the populace in houses where it was suspected they might be hidden. The çanaille found nothing,

Mazarin, accompanied by les nièces. finally established himself at Bruhl, near Cologne, and there, within a few months, took place the marriage of the eldest niece, Laure Mancini, only fifteen years of age, to the Duc de Mercoeur, the eldest son of the Duc de Vendôme, grandson of Henri IV. and Gabrielle d’Estries, and brother of the Duc de Beaufort (the so-called Roi des Halles). The young people had been affianced before the flight from France, and the duke bravely placed himself by the side of the cardinal in his downfall, to whom the satisfaction of this adherence must have been great. But the excitement this conduct occasioned among the cardinal’s enemies in France was greater still. The chief of them, Condé, to whom, it is said, the cardinal had pledged himself to form no alliance without his consent, denounced the marriage to the Parliament, and forced the poor duke, on his return to France, to give explanations before that body. Mademoiselle (la grande Mademoiselle) in her Memoirs says that " M. de Mercoeur declared one day in full Parliament his marriage with Mademoiselle de Mancini. ... All that can be said of his marriage is that it was not one of self-interest, for it took place at the height of the ill-fortune of M. le Cardinal.”It seems indeed to have been one of sincere and enduring and mutual affection.

But in another twelvemonth the return to power of the cardinal, with all its consequences, indemnified the duke and his family for the trials they had undergone. The king showed warm personal friendship for his former playmate, Laure, only two years older than himself, and she was loved by the queen-mother ; but she lived much of the time at Anet, the home of the Vendôme family, devoted to good works, in the company of her excellent mother-in-law. She became the mother of two sons, the eldest of whom was the celebrated Vendôme, who fought the battle of Luzzara, in 1702, against his cousin, Prince Eugene ; the second is known as the Great Prior. After the birth of a third son, the duchess, not yet twentyone years old, died, " deeply regretted,” says Madame de Motteville, “ by her kindred and by all the court; for virtue and beauty attract the good-will of men.”

It was believed that her death was partly due to grief for the loss of her mother, who four years previously, in 1653, two years after the duchess’s marriage, had come to Paris, at the cardinal’s bidding, accompanied by Signora Martinozzi, — both pronounced to be “virtuous women ” by the virtuous woman just quoted.² They brought with them Laure Martinozzi and Marie and Hortense Mancini, the two eldest fourteen years of age, and Hortense ten. Two years later still, in 1655, came Marianne Mancini, when nine years old, three years younger than Hortense. About the time of the arrival of the two mothers, so high had mounted the cardinal’s fortunes, and so depressed were those of his principal enemies, that the Prince de Conti, younger brother of the great Condé (at this moment withdrawal, like a wounded lion, into Flanders), asked in marriage — by way, as be confessed, of “ marrying the cardinal ” — Anne Marie Martinozzi. He would equally have welcomed for his wife Olympe Mancini, but chance decided for her cousin ; and as Madame de Motteville says, “ the Prince de Conti found many advantages in the choice he made of Mademoiselle de Martinozzi ; for with beauty she had much sweetness of disposition, much intelligence and reasonableness. These qualities, so agreeable to a husband, were later perfected by her piety, which was so great that she had the honor of following him in the austere path of the strictest religious devotion ; but she had this superiority to him, that she gave to God a perfectly pure soul, whose innocence was the foundation of her virtue.”

Sainte-Beuve has pleased himself in carefully portraying more than once the gracious figure of this princess, a benefactress and friend of Port Royal, and has well described the successive changes that transmuted her from “ une honnête païenne ” (in her own phrase) to a sweet saint. Her earliest ambition for worldly splendor was more than satisfied by her brilliant marriage, when she was only seventeen. But her husband, though always sincerely attached to her, was a weak, debauched man, whose handsome face and humpbacked figure formed an appropriate vesture for his vehement but capricious intelligence. He was ever at the mercy of the fancy of the moment, always in extremes ; and in his later and pious years after his marriage he was as completely controlled by the influence of his religious director as he bad been during his youthful and worldly days by that of his sister, Madame de Longueville.

It was not long before the young princess was eagerly desiring something higher yet than the grandeur and magnificence of her state. Her instinct at this moment was to shut out from her soul the glimmerings of Christian light which seemed only to awaken her discontent, and she affected indifference to religion. But secret maladies warned her that even in youth the hour of eternity may strike at any moment, and her already converted husband lost no occasion to turn her heavenward. Within two or three years after her marriage a change in her feelings regarding religion took place suddenly, and from that moment she walked undeviatingly in the paths of practical piety and charity. “ Naturally proud,” says Sainte-Beuve, “somewhat inclined to avarice, she mastered her inclinations, cared for the poor and the sick, gave alms largely with discretion and intelligence, not forgetting justice even in charity.”

During the terrible winter of 1662 she sold her jewels, and gave their value (amounting to sixty thousand crowns) to the poor. In a letter of the Mère Agnès of Port Royal, dated May 14, 1662, we read : “ Their destitution is so extreme throughout this kingdom that the hardest hearts are appalled and subdued by it. There is great almsgiving at Paris. Three days ago, Madame la Princesse de Conti sent to the ladies who have charge of the poor her pearl necklace worth forty thousand francs; and this is besides what she is giving in the province where she is.” Another authority, speaking of her parting with this (or perhaps a second) pearl necklace, a very beautiful one, says : “ It is true that as she gave it away and looked at it for the last time she breathed a little sigh.” That ‘‘little sigh ” adds an indescribable charm to the incident.

The epitaph on the monument raised to her by her sons, brilliant and dissolute men, the sons of their father, presents the chief incidents of her life, and, as Sainte-Benve has remarked, contains nothing but truth : —

“ To the glory of God, and to the lasting memory of Anne Marie Martinozzi, who, seeing at the age of nineteen years the deceivingness of the world, sold all her jewels to feed, during the famine of 1662, the poor of Berri, Champagne, and Picardie; who practiced all the austerities her health could endure; who, a widow at the age of twenty-nine, consecrated the rest of her life to bring up as Christian princes the princes her sons, and to maintain throughout her possessions the temporal and ecclesiastical laws ; who reduced her expenditure to a very modest sum, and made restitution of all property whose mode of acquisition seemed to her suspicious, to the amount of eight hundred thousand livres ; who distributed all her spare money to the poor on her own estates and in all parts of the world ; and who passed suddenly into eternity, after sixteen years of perseverance, the 4th of February, 1672, aged thirty-five years.”

“Consider,” observes Sainte-Beuve, — “consider all the thoughtfulness and depth of feeling, the enlightenment in the Christian sense, in this piety that felt the need of expiation and payment on behalf of others : for her husband, the Prince de Conti, the fomenter of civil wars, and the cause of disasters in so many villages and huts ; for her uncle the cardinal, the eager and unscrupulous acquirer of not-to-be-estimated wealth. From whatever side we look at it, we find ourselves in the presence of an inspiration of the rarest kind, of an admirable spirit of sacrifice, and are impressed with sovereign respect.”

The year after the marriage of the Princesse de Conti, the marriage of her sister to the Duke of Modena took place (1655). It was the beginning of a career the details of which, so far as are known, possessed little or no personal interest. She was left a widow young; conducted her own life with dignity, and the affairs of the duchy with success during her son’s minority ; married her daughter, Beatrice d’Este (known in English history as Mary of Modena), to the Duke of York, afterward James II.; and spent her last years at Rome, beloved for her good works there as she had been at Modena.

Madame de Martinozzi, after the marriages of her daughters, returned to Italy, leaving her sister in France, “ esteemed by all the court,” says our trustworthy Madame de Motteville. But it was only the next year that Madame de Mancini died, still young. When dying, she recommended to her brother the cardinal her children, and especially begged him to place in a convent her third daughter, Marie, “ because she had always seemed to her to have a bad nature, and her late husband, who was a great astrologer, had told her that she would be the cause of many ills.”

Poor Marie ! The course of her tragic fate will be more intelligible if we follow out first the fortunes of her elder sister, Olympe. She was the nearest in age to the king, and in their childish companionship was closest to him. She was not beautiful. Madame de Motteville says that when she first came to France she had little even of the natural beauty of youth, save brilliant eyes. But at eighteen her figure became round and her complexion clear ; “ her face was less long, her cheeks had dimples that gave her a great charm, and her mouth was smaller, and she had beautiful hands and arms ; ” but more than all, la, faveur avec le grand ajustement, social success with fine attire, gave brilliancy to her commonplace prettiness. “ In fine, she appeared charming in the eyes of the king, and rather pretty to all indifferent persons.” Her intelligence, Madame de la Fayette says, was not remarkable, nor was it much polished, but it was natural and sprightly with persons with whom she was familiar. The king’s admiration for her caused the fear to arise that he might wish “ to do her more honor than she deserved.” Nothing definite, however, came to pass, or at least was known to take place, and Mademoiselle de Mancini sonjeolt a ses affaires, and would have been glad to pick up a prince or a duke, like her cousins and sister. But the years went on, the king continuing to be more or less in love with her, and making her always the centre of the court balls and other brilliant gayeties and festivities, till at last, turning her back (perhaps not altogether) on the flattering hopes these royal attentions must have kept alive, she married in 1657 (three weeks after the death of her sister, the Duchesse de Mercœur) Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Comte de Soissons, " un assez honnêtehomme, et surtout un bon mari,” according to Madame de Motteville; but whose astonishment on being told that he talked prose was later to become a jest ready for the use of Molière. Her marriage did not take her from court, and the relations between her and the king became more rather than less intimate.

But the cardinal, carefully playing his cards, drew forth now from the convent in which they had been educated Marie and Hortense, and produced them at court, at the ages of eighteen and fourteen, for the express, almost the avowed, purpose of their becoming in their turn the king’s companions. Hortense, the younger, was very beautiful; Marie was ugly. She was tall and straight, but thin and sallow, and in person wholly unattractive. Her eyes were large, but so lacking in lustre that they were uncouth ; “ ils paroissoient rudes ; ” in fact, she had not a single beauty save fine teeth. In spite of this, it was not long before the king began to take pleasure in her conversation. She was full of audacity and of vigorous intelligence, though her mind was unpolished, as were her manners also. Her desire to please the king soon, however, corrected her roughnesses, and the vehemence of her nature quickly aroused responsive passion in him. It was she who first awoke the stronger qualities of the character of Louis; who inspired him with will, with the desire to rule, to govern affairs himself; who pointed out to him the path he later trod with so royal a step. It was she, too, who first sincerely loved him, and whom it is almost certain he loved with more sincerity and heartfelt passion than he did any woman afterward. Her purity or her pride, or perhaps merely her ambition, saved her from any degradation. She unquestionably hoped to become his wife, and she never became his mistress. The queen-mother saw the relations between them with extreme displeasure. She had a personal aversion to Mademoiselle de Mancini, and suspected her, not without reason, of alienating her son from her.

At the moment when the court went to Lyons, in 1658, to consider the marriage of Louis with his cousin (his father’s niece), the Princess Margaret of Savoy, the combined and alternating success and failure of the ardent wishes of Marie was an extraordinary spectacle. Her jealousy of the princess, who visibly attracted the king on their first meeting; her power over her royal lover, which she found to he sufficiently great to make him cold to the princess afterward ; their now almost unbroken companionship, often for four or live hours at a time,³—all these things “ caused her to love still more him whom she already loved only too much,” to use Madame de Motteville’s phrase.

At this time Olympe was out of favor. During the first days of the journey, “ the king,” Mademoiselle reports, “did not say a word to the Comtesse de Soissons, and at Dijon it was the same thing; ” and her sister scarcely spoke to her, and lost no occasion “ de la picoter” The great eyes of Marie, during these days, it is said, were “ full of fire,” and she flamed with sudden and momentary beauty.

The negotiations with Savoy came to an end in consequence of the commencement of negotiations for the marriage of Louis with his cousin (his mother’s niece), Marie Thérèse of Spain. In the midst of all these formal demands on the part of statesmen, the king threw himself at Mazarin’s feet, and implored him to permit his marriage to Marie. The conduct of the cardinal at this moment is not easy of interpretation. Whether he was afraid to break off the Spanish marriage, which the queen-mother had greatly at heart; whether he honorably desired the advantages to France that would accrue from this marriage ; whether, in his profound ambition, he distrusted the advantages to himself from such an extraordinary elevation of his family as his niece’s becoming queen; whether, as seems on the whole most probable, he had perceived a personal animosity of tone and inimicalness of attitude, an unconcealed hostility, on the part of Marie towards himself, and feared that the pupilage in which he had kept the king would be thwarted by her influence ; whether each and all of these motives affected him in turn, the result was that he unhesitatingly and absolutely refused the king’s prayer. He declared to the king that he would never consent to his making so unequal an alliance, one so derogatory to his glory; and if be insisted on doing it of his own supreme authority, he himself should on the instant ask permission to leave France ; adding, with a burst of Italian passion, that he was the master of his niece, and that he would stab her rather than see her rise to so treacherous a height.

He did not assassinate her, but he sent her away from Paris. The icing, on parting with her, was in tears, and a world of bitterness, of indignant disappointment. was uttered in her farewell to him: “Je pars; vous êtes roi, et vous pleurez ! ” ⁴ The previous evening he passed with his mother, overwhelmed with sadness; and on his leaving her the queen said to Madame de Motteville: “ The king excites my compassion; he is both full of feeling and reasonable; and I have just told him that I am sure he will thank me some day for the pain I am giving him.” Not long after, the court went to Bordeaux to sign the Spanish peace that was to lead on to the Spanish marriage. On his way thither the king obtained an interview with Mademoiselle de Mancini at Saint-Jean-d’Angely. He appeared more deeply in love than ever, and renewed all his vows of fidelity. During their subsequent separation he wrote her for a time, “ not letters, but volumes daily,” as we learn by a letter of remonstrance to him from the cardinal.

But the conclusion of this romance was approaching. As Madame de la Fayette has said, “time, absence, and reflection led him to break his promises.” ⁵ Ten months after his second parting from Marie the Spanish treaty was concluded ; he signed it, and received the infanta of Spain from the hands of her father to make her queen of France the next day. The court returned to Paris, and the cardinal, quite at ease, brought back there his niece.

It would seem that he had reconciled himself with her some months previously. The “ honnête rendezvous ” of Marie and Louis took place in the beginning of August, 1659. In September Mazarin wrote to the gouvernante of Marie in these terms : —

“ I confess that I have not had for a long time so great a pleasure as I received in reading the letter my niece wrote me, and in hearing the news you give me of the present state of her mind since she has known that the king’s marriage was wholly settled. I have never questioned her intelligence, but I have distrusted her judgment, and especially during a conjuncture in which a violent passion, accompanied by so many circumstances that made it ungovernable, allowed no room for reason to act. I repeat that I am most joyful to have such a niece, since of herself she has taken so generous a resolution, and one so adapted for her own honor and my satisfaction. I am communicating to the king what she and you wrote me she has done. I am sure his majesty will esteem her the more, and France, if she knew of her conduct in this conjuncture, would wish for her every sort of happiness, and would bestow on her a thousand benedictions; but I am sufficiently in a position to make her perceive the effects of my friendship and of the attachment I have always felt for her, which has only been interrupted in consequence of her appearing to have none for me, and to pay no regard to my counsels, though they had for their object her good and the repose of her mind.”

It does not appear what, precisely, was the step she had taken, — l’action qu’elle vient de faire, — but her uncle’s last words on this occasion are that he shall be in despair if she at all changes her purpose, and thus loses “ the merit of the noblest action site can perform in all her life.” None the less her voluntary submission to her fate does not seem to have been long-lived. She became wild with rage and despair in soon perceiving that she had lost her lover as well as her crown. The king’s passion for her expired in the arms of his wife. Olympe, too, was again in the ascendant, and became surintendante of the queen’s household, the highest position at court. She lived in the greatest splendor; she was styled “ Madame la Comtesse,” and was treated as a quasiprincess of the blood from the claims of birth of her mother-in-law, the Princesse de Carignan. She was, as Saint-Simon says, “ the mistress of the court, of all gayeties and all favors.” The sisters, reconciled and united, attracted the most brilliant society to the Hôtel de Soissons, including the king himself. He was always there; “ he did not budge from there,” in the old phrase.

But Madame la Comtesse fell into the power of a lover, the Marquis de Vardes (a personage often mentioned, with surprising tolerance, by Madame de Sévigné), and entered with him into a thousand court intrigues, in which finally “ Madame ” (Henrietta d’Angleterre) became entangled, and which caused the temporary exile of Madame la Comtesse. From that moment her days of splendor were at an end. Her husband, whose protection availed her much, died ; and somewhat later (in 1680), she was overwhelmed by the accusation of dealings with La Voisin, a famous sorceress. Similar accusations, which threw Paris and the court into the utmost excitement, involved some dozen persons of high rank; and when the great Duc de Luxembourg suffered imprisonment in consequence, Madame la Comtesse may well have been terrified about her own possible fate. She fled from France and went to Flanders, where she was treated with the utmost dishonor. She had made Louvois her enemy by refusing to his son the hand of her daughter, and he, the Abbé de Choisy says, “ pursued her to the gates of hell. In all the cities and towns she passed through, the great hostelries refused to receive her; she often had to sleep on straw, and to submit to the insults of an insolent people who called her a poisoning sorceress. M. de Louvois sent to Brussels a captain of the reformed religion, who by giving money to the populace caused abusive language to be shouted at her. She was once obliged to sleep in a convent where she had gone to buy lace, because there had assembled before the door more than three thousand people who were ready to tear her to pieces. The Comte de Monterey, governor of the Low Countries, found it necessary to take her under his protection.”

Madame de Sévigné reports the same, or another scene. “ M. de la Rochefoucauld,” she says, " told us yesterday that at Brussels the Comtesse de Soissons had been obliged to go out of the church privately, and that there had been a dance of cats tied together, or. more truly, a malicious yelling, and such a terrifying hubbub that, the cry being raised at the same time that it was the doing of devils and sorcerers who were about her, she was forced, as I tell you, to leave the place, that this madness might pass, which proceeds from not too good will in the people.”

Imagine the contrast between the hostess of the Hôtel de Soissons and the fugitive in the Brussels convent and church ; between the crowds that thronged round her in the one place and the other; between the gay jests of the former days and the insults of the latter days. She never returned to France, but ended her life in foreign lands, living in the Low Countries and Germany, Italy and Spain, for the thirty years before her death in 1708 ; separated from her children, one of whom was the famous Prince Eugene of Savoy, the great general. Whether, in 1689, she was concerned in the death of the young queen of Spain (the daughter of Henriette d’Angleterre), believed to be occasioned by poison, is an " historic doubt.”

It was in 1661 that Cardinal Mazarin died. Among his last acts were the arrangements for the marriages of his three yet unmarried nieces, and he selected for the husband of Marie the Constable Colonna, one of the chief Italian nobles, in spite of her own extreme reluctance to such exile from France as this union implied. She had not lacked other lovers, and among them there was one — the Prince Charles of Lorraine — who might perhaps have won her ; but it would seem as if the queen-mother were eager to remove her from the court, and that Mazarin obeyed the queen’s wishes.

When the time came for the marriage (which took place by proxy), Marie had the anguish of seeing herself as it were expelled from France by the king, though with all imaginable honors, paid to her as her uncle’s niece. “ She endured her suffering,” Madame de la Fayette says, " with much firmness and even with dignity ; but at the first place where she rested after leaving Paris she was so overcome by her sorrow, and so exhausted by the extreme constraint she had put upon herself, that she was almost obliged to remain there.” But she continued her way sorrowfully to Milan, where the constable met her and conveyed her to his Roman palaces.

Her life now for some ten years has little trustworthy record. It is said that her husband thought her past conduct gave grounds for his trusting her to her own guidance, and that he permitted her unusual freedom of life. This happy state of things did not, with or without reason, last indefinitely, and la connétable became fearful of the consequences of her husband’s jealousies. In 1672, her sister Hortense, whose marriage ⁶ had taken place just before her own, came flying to Rome, as a refuge from her husband. But shortly the two sisters escaped together, disguised as men, and after a wild voyage of eight days from Civita Vecchia disembarked on the shores of Provence. Thence they made their way to Aix. It was at the moment of one of the " residences ” there of Madame de Grignan with her husband, and she had the charity to provide them with clothes, saying, as Madame de Mazarin reports, that “ we were traveling like true heroines of romance, with many jewels and no clean linen.” Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter (June 20,1672) : “ The description that you give me of Madame Colonna and her sister is ... a wonderful picture. The Comtesse de Soissons and Madame de Bouillon [their youngest sister] are furious against these mad creatures, and say that they must be confined ; they are violently opposed to this strange wildness. It is thought that the king desires not to offend M. le Connétable, who is certainly the greatest nobleman in Rome.”

Finding themselves extremely uncomfortable, Hortense very soon, and later Marie, left France again. And poor Marie, like her sister Olympe ten years subsequently, wandered from the Low Countries to Spain, and from one convent to another, and from one lover to another, with occasional attempts at life with her husband, until his death in 1689. It is believed that she afterward again returned to France, but the last years of her life were passed in perfect obscurity, though it is probable that she continued to live till 1715. Another extraordinary disappearance of one of these splendid stars ! She died, perhaps, at Madrid. Saint-Simon says of her: “ She was the maddest, and at the same time the best, of these Mazarins ; “pour la plus galante, on auroit peine à décider.”

Hope Notnor.