SYMHC Classics: Mancini Sisters

This 2022 episode covers Hortense and Marie Mancini, who tried to make a place for themselves in 17th-century Europe, defying all kinds of conventions along the way. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:33Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 1:06Holly Frey?

  We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune into Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. This episode is coming out on the 380th birthday of Hortense Mancini, who was born on June 6, 1646. She is one of the two Mancini sisters we talk about in today's Saturday Classic.

• 2:22Holly Frey?

  This episode originally came out on November 14, 2022. Enjoy.

• 2:30Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:44Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  Today, we are going to talk about a pair of sisters who, along with their other sisters and their cousins, get a lot of comparisons to whatever influencer slash media celebrity is making the most headlines at any given moment. Like, over the past few years, I've seen a lot of people call them the 17th century Kardashians. They are Hortense and Marie Mancini, and they tried to make a place for themselves in the 17th century in Europe, really defying all kinds of conventions along the way. We mentioned them extremely briefly, like, just a couple of sentences way back when we interviewed Jason Porath about his

• 3:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  book and website, Rejected Princesses, in 2016. So, they've had not even like a six impossible episodes level of exploration. It just really is just like paragraph. A thing to note upfront with this episode is that I love a lot of these two women's stories. There are big chunks of their lives that are a really wild ride, and they sound full of adventure and daring and writing memoirs and hosting salons and becoming the favorites of various monarchs. But really, a lot of this was also happening as they were trying to get away from their husbands, both of whom were controlling and abusive and just frightening. And this was all happening in an era when women just really didn't have

• 4:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  the right to get a divorce from a bad marriage. So, I can see how just that whole setup would be very troubling to people. We're also going to talk a little bit about some pregnancy loss, and there are some very young marriages in this story.

• 4:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  Even to the point of seeming inordinately young, given the time period. This is a heads up.

• 4:40Holly Frey?

  So Hortense and Marie Mancini were two of the women known as the Mazarinets. They were the nieces of Cardinal Jules Mazarin, Chief Minister of France. So we need to talk a little bit about him to set the stage. He was born Giulio Mazarini in Naples in 1602, and he changed his name after moving to France, where he became an advisor and eventually Chief Minister to King Louis XIII. In 1641, Mazarin was named a Cardinal, and he was one of the people present at the baptism of the Dauphin, the future King Louis XIV, who of course also became known as the Sun King.

• 5:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Louis XIII died in 1643. That was when Louis XIV was still a child, and the young king's mother, Anne of Austria, became his regent. She and Mazarin did not initially get along. There was some butting of heads, but he was so charming and persuasive, they eventually became very close, so close that there were rumors that the two of them were secretly married.

• 5:47Holly Frey?

  Now, there is a whole swath of history that we're kind of skipping over here, including the Thirty Years' War and Mazarin being exiled for a while, and a series of civil wars in France known as the Front. But eventually, Mazarin became one of the most powerful people in France, which itself was one of the most powerful countries in Europe. He had also become extremely wealthy with money and titles and land to pass down to an heir.

• 6:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  He had no children of his own, though. His one surviving nephew had a reputation as an irresponsible libertine, so Mazarin did not think that this would be a great candidate for his successor. So he really focused on his seven nieces, moving all of them from what's now Italy to France and managing their educations to make sure that they would be witty and cultured and personable, able to fit into French society. And then he arranged advantageous marriages for all of them to build a legacy for himself that way.

• 6:51Holly Frey?

  Five of Mazarin's nieces were the daughters of Hieronyma and Lorenzo Mancini. That included Hortense and Marie, who we're going to come back to. Their sister, Laure Victoire, married Louis de Vendôme, Duke de Mercure, who was King Henry IV's grandson. Sadly, she died at the age of 20, shortly after giving birth to their third son. Another sister, Olympe, married Eugene Maurice of Savoy, Comte de Soissons. The youngest Mancini sister, Marie Anne, married Godfrey Maurice de la Tour d'Orvergne, Duke of Bouillon. Mazarin's two other nieces were the two daughters of Girolamo Martinazzi and Laura Margorita Mazzarini.

• 7:35Holly Frey?

  They were Anne-Marie, who married Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, and Laura, who married Alphonse IV, Dest, Duke of Modena.

• 7:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  In addition to Hortense and Marie, some of these women wound up being famous and even notorious in their own ways. There were court scandals and affairs with kings, and in the case of Olympe and Marie Anne Mancini, allegations of poisoning people during the Affair of the Poisons. As its name suggests, the Affair of the Poisons involved poisonings and alleged poisonings and allegations of people using black magic and love potions to try to sway the king. Previous hosts of the show did an episode on this. It came out on January 19th of 2011. We're not running this one as a Saturday classic because it's in the middle of a series that they did on the House of Bourbon.

• 8:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  It builds on the previous episodes that they had released over the prior couple of weeks. It's just a little bit more in medias res than we would generally try to do. I think you can follow it. It just was a little like...

• 8:44Holly Frey?

  It's not quite as standalone.

• 8:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right, right. So we didn't want to stick it into the feed by itself.

• 8:51Holly Frey?

  Marie Mancini was born Anna Maria Mancini on August 28, 1639. Her younger sister Hortense was born Hortensia Mancini on June 6, 1646.

• 9:03Holly Frey?

  In spite of the seven-year gap in their ages, these two sisters became very close. In 1654, when Marie was 15 and Hortense was eight, their caregivers judged them as being ready to start making their way into French society. But when Mazarin met with them, he disagreed with that assessment, and he sent them to a convent together for another 18 months for further study and refinement.

• 9:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  Just in case anyone is wondering, why are you not saying her name Hortense, as she might have said it in French? She eventually moved to Britain, and everybody knew her as Hortense, and it seemed weird to change pronunciations partway through the episode. Neither of these sisters was considered to be particularly exceptional when they were very young. In her younger years, Marie was described as awkward and uncooperative, while Hortense was pretty and charming, but also described in terms like apathetic and insignificant. 17th century French writer Madame de Lafayette wrote of Hortense, quote, "She was not only the most beautiful of the cardinal's nieces,

• 10:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  but she was the most beautiful of all the court beauties. Had she been gifted with more intelligence and a greater vivacity of manner, she would have been perfect. Not that everyone considered that a weak point for her, for many people found her careless attitude and languid manner a distinct attraction."

• 10:29Holly Frey?

  Once they got to court, Marie caught the eye of one particular man, the king, Louis XIV, with the two teens becoming deeply devoted to one another. So this might sound like a pretty great development, considering that Cardinal Mazarin was trying to marry his nieces to high-ranking men. Marie's father was a baron, so marrying the king would have been an enormous step up. But Louis needed to marry royalty, ideally someone who could solidify an alliance between France and another powerful country.

• 11:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  By 1659, when the king was 20 and Marie was 19, he was begging to be allowed to marry her. And meanwhile, his mother and her uncle were working to separate them. Marie was finally sent away from court in the company of her sisters Hortense and Maryanne. Reportedly, the last thing she said to him was, quote, "Sire, I am leaving you to weep, and yet you are king."

• 11:30Holly Frey?

  In spite of efforts to keep them apart, Louis and Marie kept up a continual secret correspondence, including sending one another gifts. One of these gifts was a puppy sent from Louis to Marie with a collar that said, "I belong to Marie." That would have been pretty hard to keep secret.

• 11:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, just gonna keep a puppy secret from everybody. In the end, a marriage was arranged between King Louis XIV of France and Maria Teresa Infanta of Spain and Archduchess of Austria. Their marriage was part of the Peace of the Pyrenees, which ended the Franco-Spanish War. Louis managed to arrange a brief visit to Marie on his way to make the final marriage negotiations. And during this visit, the two of them had a bunch of very sad, apologetic, like teen romance conversations, most of them happening in front of her sister Hortense. Then after Louis was married, Marie and Hortense followed a process that was outlined

• 12:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  in Ovid's Cures for Love, to ritually get rid of anything that might remind her of him or otherwise soothe her heartbreak.

• 12:42Holly Frey?

  Meanwhile, Mazarin was working on arranging a marriage for Marie, not just to try to put a final end to her feelings of the king, but also because his own health was declining and he wanted to make sure all of his nieces were settled before he died.

• 12:58Holly Frey?

  Marie's marriage contract to Italian prince Lorenzo Anofrio Colonna was signed on February 21, 1661.

• 13:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hortense was married very soon after. Like her sister, she had already captured the interest of someone much more powerful than she or her family, and that was Charles II of England. At the time, though, he was not on the throne of England. He was in exile in France, having fled England during the English Civil Wars. Charles actually proposed to Hortense, but unlike her sister and Louis XIV, the issue wasn't that Charles really needed to make a royal marriage alliance. It was that Cardinal Mazarin did not think it was very likely that Charles was actually going to get to return to the British throne. So he declined this offer. He was like, no, I'm not marrying my niece to a deposed king.

• 13:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  What would the point of that be? However, Charles was indeed restored as monarch in 1660, which was not long after all of this happened.

• 14:00Holly Frey?

  Wa, wa, made a mistake. Instead, Hortense married Armand Char de Leporté, who had been considered a suitor for some of her sisters, but who had always been particularly interested in Hortense. Like, interested in a way that multiple people commented on as disturbing and frankly inappropriate. He had been fixated on her since she was nine, and he was about 14 years older than she was. When they married on March 1st of 1661, he was 29 and she was just 14.

• 14:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mazarin's acceptance of this proposal seems to have been largely based on the fact that he thought Armand would take care of his estates and his fortune. He had decided that the vast majority of that fortune was going to go to whoever Hortense married, and that person would also become the Duke of Mazarin and inherit Mazarin's other titles. Armand was deeply religious and mature and responsible, so the Cardinal didn't think he was likely to just fritter away his inheritance or otherwise make an embarrassment of his legacy.

• 15:09Holly Frey?

  Armand came into that inheritance really quickly. Cardinal Jules Mazarin died on March 9, 1661, just days after the wedding. We're going to talk more about all of this after a sponsor break.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 15:28Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:56Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:03Speaker 05

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• 16:08Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:20Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 17:05Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 17:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends

• 18:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 18:31Speaker 06

  Okay, chicken nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.

• 19:14Speaker 06

  This new chicken nugget, reinvented, based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken, and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 19:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  In some ways, Marie and Hortense Mancini's marriages were similar at first, especially in that both of them were very focused on having babies, and particularly on trying to have a male heir. After recovering from a serious illness and then experiencing a miscarriage, Marie gave birth to three sons, Filippo, Marcantonio, and Carlo, who were born in 1663, 1664, and 1665. Hortense had four babies in five years. Marie Charlotte in 1662, Marie Anne in 1663, Marie Olympe in 1665, and Paul Jules in 1666.

• 20:13Holly Frey?

  But in other ways, the early years of their marriages were almost completely opposite from one another. It became clear, pretty much immediately, that Hortense's husband, the new Duc Mazarin, was a religious fanatic, to the point of being really irrational. He micromanaged minute details of the lives of people who lived on the land that he managed, arguing that by doing so, he was going to save their souls. And this included- Things like trying to get the milkmaids to spend less time milking because he thought they might find it erotic and believing that churning milk into butter was immodest and could lead to arousal. Sounds like the milkmaids are not the problem. He ordered

• 20:54Holly Frey?

  mothers to teach their babies to fast by refusing to nurse them on Fridays. When a fire broke out at the palace, he ordered the servants who put it out to be flogged, and he flogged some of them himself because he thought that they had interfered with the will of God.

• 21:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  He was also extremely possessive and controlling of virtually everything about Hortense's life. By the terms of her uncle's will, they were enormously wealthy as a couple, but almost none of that wealth was exclusively hers. The only thing of material value that was actually considered her property and only hers was her jewelry, which her husband tried to confiscate from her because he said that it was going to lead her into temptation.

• 21:39Holly Frey?

  In terms of Marie's marriage, there were some ways that her husband Lorenzo could be controlling. For example, he blamed her pregnancy loss on her love of riding horses. And when she got pregnant again, he forced her to give up riding and to be carried on a sedan chair. But unlike Hortense's husband, who tried to lock her away and keep her from anything that might be a temptation, Marie's husband wanted to show her off, hosting masked balls and salons and lavish galas. They became patrons of the arts, theater, and culture, and they spent lots of time in Venice, where they crossed paths with past podcast subject Christina of Sweden.

• 22:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  But Marie's relationship with her husband seems to have really deteriorated around the time of her pregnancy with their third son. He had an affair with another woman who gave birth to a child that everyone knew was his. Then Marie had a really difficult delivery, and she was worried that she wouldn't survive another pregnancy.

• 22:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  That combined with her mortification over her husband's affair to lead her to try to put an end to their physical relationship. Lorenzo, of course, was not happy about that idea at all.

• 22:54Holly Frey?

  Meanwhile, Hortense, having provided her husband with a male heir, was trying to end her physical relationship with him as well. Armand had become incredibly controlling and paranoid about every conceivable thing, all within this framework of extreme religious piety. When Hortense started trying to avoid him, all of that got worse. And contrary to what Cardinal Mazarin had expected, Armand was not being that careful with his inheritance. He gave huge amounts of money away to the church and charities, and he bought land that wasn't really going to pay off as an investment. Hortense thought that they were going to wind up with nothing, and in 1666, she started trying to legally separate their assets.

• 23:39Holly Frey?

  This wasn't the same thing as dissolving the marriage. She was just trying to kind of partition off some of their money so that it was under her control, just so Armand couldn't spend it all.

• 23:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  When Armand said that they should pull out their daughter's front teeth so that men would not find them tempting, Hortense fled to her sister, Olympe. Olympe promised to try to protect the children, but she also didn't really want to bring her sister in to live with them full time. So, Olympe tried to mediate between Hortense and Armand. Hortense did not think their issues could be reconciled, and when her husband said that she could either live with one of her sisters or go to a convent, she went to the convent.

• 24:21Holly Frey?

  While in the convent, Hortense developed an intense relationship with the marquise Marie Sidonie de Cursel, who was there under charges of adultery. She was 17, and Hortense was 21, and together, the two of them ran roughshod over the nuns, who were essentially acting as their jailers, including playing a whole lot of pranks like putting ink in the holy water. That's funny.

• 24:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  It really sounds almost like a like a weird comedy about a boarding school like

• 24:55Holly Frey?

  Right.

• 24:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  playing pranks on the teachers. Marie Sudani helped Hortense with her legal filings and eventually Hortense did get a partial victory. The court ordered that her husband grant her a pension of 20,000 livres a year and to document what he was doing with all of their money. She was also supposed to return back to their home while her husband, who was the grand master of artillery, would instead live at the arsenal of Paris. Hortense left the convent, but Armand refused to do any of the things he had been ordered to do and also destroyed the theater that Hortense had used to stage small productions at their home while she was away.

• 25:39Holly Frey?

  Meanwhile, Marie Sudani reconciled with her husband, and that was something that made Hortense so jealous that she told him that Marie Sudani had been receiving secret visits from another man. This led to a duel between Marie Sudani's husband and her lover, after which both of them were imprisoned for violating the prohibition on dueling.

• 26:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the face of Armand's increasingly erratic and frightening behavior, Hortense moved from trying to legally separate their assets into a formal separation from their marriage. And on June 13, 1668, she fled to Italy with the help of her brother Philippe and a friend of theirs, the Chevalier of Rohan. She left her children behind, hoping that she would be better able to advocate for them away from her husband. She took a couple of servants with her disguised as men.

• 26:33Holly Frey?

  This was just not done. Women of her social class did not leave their husbands, and they certainly did not travel without male escorts. The trip itself involved a perilous journey through the Alps. In Milan, Hortense reunited with her sister Marie, who had come out from Rome with her husband. Lorenzo wanted to go back home immediately, but Hortense and Marie convinced him to stop in Siena for a couple of weeks instead, and there they spent their time riding and hunting.

• 27:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  Apart from the social norms that Hortense had really abandoned here, this was basically an international incident with Hortense, a Duchess, fleeing her home in France to join her sister, whose husband was an Italian prince. Hortense also quickly started having an affair with the Chevalier of Rohan's Squire, which was yet another layer of scandal and also came across as a huge annoyance to Marie and Lorenzo. They were sort of like, we're trying to help you out and you're having this public affair with a squire. Why are you doing this? More generally, though, Lorenzo was annoyed with his wife, Marie. They were both living fairly separate lives by this point,

• 27:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  but he was increasingly frustrated by how much money she spent on things like artwork and improvements to their home and cultural projects, and as well as the many, many outings that she took with her sister. In 1671, Marie got really sick and people thought her husband was poisoning her. Meanwhile, the Chevalier's Squire also accused Philippe and the Chevalier of trying to poison him. This was during the whole Affair of the Poisons era. There was a lot-

• 28:16Holly Frey?

  There's a whole lot of poison going on.

• 28:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Poisoning and accused poisoning and potential poisoning happening.

• 28:21Holly Frey?

  A marriage was arranged for Philippe that year, and Hortense went with him to Paris to try to get some kind of legal resolution to her marriage. Her husband was irate when he heard how Hortense had been spending her time in Rome. She and her sister had filled their time with parties and masked balls and musical performances, with Hortense being so popular with men that two of them allegedly fought a duel over her.

• 28:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Armand called for Hortense's arrest, but city officials refused to do it. And he became so irate that he destroyed a lot of their art collection. He smashed the genitals of the statues with a hammer and cut them out of paintings with scissors. King Louis XIV was upset about this. In addition to the king's love of and patronage for art, the king and other people also considered this art collection that had been destroyed to have been a national treasure. So whatever goodwill people might have had for Armand at this point really evaporated.

• 29:24Holly Frey?

  In France at this time, divorce as we know it today really didn't exist. There was a process for separating a couple's assets. Hortense had already tried that. And separation de coeur, or physical separation, in which a couple were still technically married, but lived legally separated lives. But this was not common at all, and a lot of people were still pushing for some kind of reconciliation between Hortense and Armand. Hortense proposed that she be allowed to live in a convent with servants that she chose and the freedom to come and go. Based on what had happened with Marie Sidonie de Courcelle, the abbesses at the convents proposed as options were pretty wary of this whole idea.

• 30:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  They did not want any more ink in the holy water. Finally, still without the settlement that she wanted, Hortense left Paris again. She returned to her sister in Rome in May of 1671. And then about a year later, both of them fled.

• 30:25Holly Frey?

  We're going to talk more about that after we pause for a sponsor break.

• 30:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jessa have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective

• 31:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  from four friends proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 31:31Speaker 06

  Okay, Chicken Nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped. And they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.

• 32:14Speaker 06

  This new chicken nugget, reinvented based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 32:27Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 33:39Speaker 07

  Livrite, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, "The Gales of November," a chronicle of the S. S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Seitz proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. "The Gales of November," now in paperback.

• 34:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  Marie Mancini's relationship with her husband Lorenzo had clearly been deteriorating for a long time before she fled from Rome with her sister Hortense on May 29th of 1672. She was afraid of her husband, and she admired her sister's will to have left her own husband Armand. But if there was like some specific last straw that prompted Marie to decide to leave, like she didn't note it anywhere. It may have just come to that point.

• 34:46Holly Frey?

  The Mancini sisters wanted to travel unobtrusively, so they didn't take much with them apart from some money and jewelry and a letter of safe passage from King Louis XIV. "The sisters and two maids all wore men's clothing under their dresses, and they took a valet with them as well." They took steps to try to throw people off the trail, like getting a carriage and loudly talking about where they were going, when really they were headed to a boat to make their escape by water.

• 35:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Meanwhile, Lorenzo kept sending people to find them and trying to put barriers in the way of their escape, like spreading the word that people should not give the sisters any kind of shelter or allow them to pass through areas where he thought they were headed. He also petitioned King Louis XIV to intervene. Both Lorenzo and Armand worried about how their wives' behavior would reflect on them, and there were broader concerns about how the sisters might inspire other women in unhappy or abusive marriages to also leave.

• 35:50Holly Frey?

  Have feelings. As the Mancini sisters headed for France, this was once again an international incident. Marie really thought that if she could go speak to King Louis XIV in person, that he might support her petition to leave her husband. But she couldn't get permission to actually go. Once they were traveling over land again, the two women traveled by post with the hope that they would be harder to track. But the king sent messengers to the post stations, telling them to refuse to give the sisters horses. That was something that the sisters overcame with bribes.

• 36:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  After some close calls, Hortense and Marie decided to split up with Marie traveling through France and Hortense going to Chambéry, which today is part of France, but at the time was part of the independent Duchy of Savoy. There, she found a patron with Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy, who had actually been one of the men whose offer of marriage Hortense's uncle had not accepted many years before. This duke seems to have thought that Hortense would liven up his court, which she eventually did. But first, she spent a stretch of time, mostly in prayer and reflection and writing a whole lot of letters.

• 37:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  King Louis XIV had offered her some financial support, and so she wrote a lot of letters to the king to try to maintain his goodwill, even though she had done something as scandalous as leaving her husband. She also wrote letters to her sister's husband to try to convince him that Marie's leaving had been her own decision, not something that Hortense had forced her or caused her to do.

• 37:32Holly Frey?

  Toward the end of Hortense's time in Savoy, when she was 29, she wrote her memoirs. These were published in 1675 under the title Memoirs d'Amelie M., or Memoirs de Madame Duchess de Mazarin. There was already so much rumor and gossip about her life and her relationship with her husband that she just decided to put her own side of the story out there publicly and in print. This made her one of the first women in Europe to publish her own story under her own name and for a general audience, rather than just for her family and friends.

• 38:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  Meanwhile, Marie was trying to evade various messengers that she knew were carrying orders for her to stop where she was. She's basically like, if they don't find me, I don't have to stop. One of them did finally catch up to her, though. And then she was presented with a series of proposals that would involve her returning to her husband. She rejected all of those and said that she wanted to enter a convent of her choice, something that she pointed out that thousands of other women had done after being widowed or otherwise separated from their husbands. Once she had made her whole position on this clear, she apparently picked up a guitar and started playing it as though she had just said all

• 38:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  she had to say about that and moved on. One of the accounts that I read said that she had kept this guitar with her the entire time since leaving Rome, but it also said that they left without a lot of luggage. So I'm not sure where the guitar came from, but I love that story.

• 39:07Holly Frey?

  I like, I like the idea of the guitar being her version of la, la, la, la, I'm not listening to you.

• 39:14Holly Frey?

  Eventually, Marie was allowed to go to a convent in Lyss, about 40 miles outside of Paris, which is one of the convents Hortense had stayed in previously. At first, Marie had regular visits from her sisters Olympe and Marianne, and her husband sent some of her servants with some of her belongings that she had requested. But Lorenzo had sent one of those servants to act as a spy, and soon Marie was being allowed visits only from her sisters. Marie later moved to another convent that was farther from Paris, but she was even less happy there. It wasn't as comfortable, and she said that the air was bad and made her sick.

• 39:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  At one point, Marie arranged a visit to her sister Hortense, but Hortense seems to have intentionally avoided Marie by going on a trip to the country instead. I don't think this was just a case of bad timing. I think it was on purpose. Hortense may have been worried that if she really welcomed her sister, she would run afoul of some of the good graces that at that point were keeping her relatively safe. But when Marie later wrote to Hortense asking for her protection, Hortense and the Duke of Savoy arranged for Marie to enter a convent in Turin. Marie was just really hoping to find a place where she would have a little more comfort and

• 40:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  autonomy. But after a really perilous journey through territory that was caught up in the Franco-Dutch War, in the winter, she wound up at a convent where she had even less freedom than she'd had before.

• 40:48Holly Frey?

  After Hortense's memoirs were published, Marie got a copy. The memoirs had been so popular that other people started writing and publishing fake versions of their own. Some of these were wildly inaccurate about both sisters, including totally distorted versions of Marie's experiences. So she followed in her sister's footsteps and she published her own memoir, "The Truth in Its Own Light," or "The Genuine Memoirs of M. Mancini, Constable Colonna."

• 41:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Around this time, Hortense was working on plans to leave Savoy. She and her staff just kind of weren't getting along with people anymore. As she was trying to make those arrangements, though, the duke died suddenly on June 12, 1675, at the age of only 40. The duke's son, Victor Amadeus II, was only nine, so his widow was acting as regent, but she had really never been a fan of Hortense. She told Hortense that she was no longer welcome at the late duke's court. The duke's death was also a blow to Marie, because even though she had not been living in Savoy, I'm not sure if these two ever even actually met, she had written him really often and counted him as one of her allies.

• 42:04Holly Frey?

  After the duke's death, Hortense started making her way to England, where she had a cousin, and she got a letter from Ralph Montague, passing on an invitation from Charles II. The Franco-Dutch War was still ongoing, so Hortense's journey was perilous. She arrived on New Year's Eve, 1675.

• 42:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  Charles II, of course, was nicknamed the Merry Monarch. He was famous for having a whole lot of affairs, and as we said earlier, he was one of the people who had offered to marry Hortense Mancini decades before.

• 42:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  She also had a reputation for being very charming and witty and attractive and popular with men. So there were fears at court that the king might be a little bit overly interested in her and that she might kind of throw off the balance of his other relationships and this like house of affairs cards would turn into chaos. These fears were founded. Soon, the king and Hortense were having an affair and he had granted her a pension.

• 43:09Holly Frey?

  In 1676, Hortense Mancini started hosting salons in England, ones that were open to women and gave them opportunities to learn and experience art and culture, free from many of the cultural restraints that were normally placed on them. Her friend, Charles de Saint-Avermont, acted as co-host and sometimes the two of them are credited with popularizing champagne in England. Charles imported it from France and they served it at the salon. Hortense also had a lot of pets, including dogs and cats and parrots and other exotic birds, and she had gambling tables, which led some people to write off her salon as a gambling den.

• 43:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hortense Mancini had affairs throughout her life away from her husband, and one of the most notorious was while she was in England. It was with Anne, Countess of Sussex, who was one of the king's illegitimate daughters. Although she was only 14 and was already married to a man named Thomas Leonard, who was one of the gentlemen of the king's bedchamber, neither Hortense nor Anne seemed upset by rumors that they were lovers and they really did not try to contradict them.

• 44:20Holly Frey?

  One of the people who commented on this was Lady Chaworth, who wrote this in a letter to her brother, Lord Russe, on December 25, 1676. Quote, "Lady Sussex is not yet gone, but my lord is better and holds his resolution of going as soon as the weather breaks up to make good travailing. She and Madame Mazarin have privately learned to fence and went down into St. James Park the other day with drawn swords under their nightgowns, which they drew out and made several fine passes with, to the admiration of several men that was onlookers in the park."

• 44:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  In another letter, she wrote, quote, "Lady Sussex is mightily pleased with fox hunting and hare hunting, but kisses Madame Mazarin's picture with much affection still."

• 45:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  This might have been after Anne's husband demanded that she come back from Hortense's lodgings and she was forcibly removed from there.

• 45:15Holly Frey?

  Hortense had various other affairs, including a possible one with past podcast subject Afra Ben. Her relationship with the Count of Monaco eventually became public and close enough that King Charles called off his affair with her. But he wasn't so upset about it that he made her go back to France. Instead, Hortense kept up an active social life in her house in St. James's Park, including being reunited with Marie Sidonie de Corcel when she came to visit London.

• 45:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  While Hortense was having what sounds like a pretty fabulous time in London, Marie made her way to Madrid and she moved into another convent. While there, she was reunited with her sons, who by now were teenagers. Her husband Lorenzo kept trying to restrict her movements. He seems to have kind of allowed her to go to Madrid, thinking that family members he had there would help keep her in line. But officials in Madrid seemed less inclined to do what Lorenzo wanted them to do. The Archbishop of Cesaro wrote him a letter that said in part, quote, "Here, we do not treat our wives as you do in Italy. Your wish to put her in a prison is not enough to see it done."

• 46:28Holly Frey?

  But Lorenzo would not give up in his efforts to get her to return to their marriage, or if not that, at least to be able to control her comings and goings. Eventually, he ordered her imprisonment in a medieval fortress in Seville known as the Alcazar, something even her detractors thought was too extreme, because this was a cold, drafty place and this was happening in the middle of winter.

• 46:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1681, Lorenzo proposed that Marie enter the convent as a novice, meaning that she would be on her way to taking steps to becoming a nun, rather than just being sheltered in the convent. He said that he would be taking holy orders as well. Marie agreed to this, although Lorenzo did not hold up his end of the bargain to take holy orders of his own.

• 47:18Holly Frey?

  Meanwhile, back in England, Hortense had fallen under suspicion in the wake of the popish plot. This was not a real plot. It was based on fabricated allegations by Anglican clergyman Titus Oates that Jesuits were planning to assassinate Charles II.

• 47:35Holly Frey?

  Even though this was not true, a lot of people believed it. And since Hortense was Catholic and a foreigner, people began to distrust her. Then in 1684, her nephew Philippe, who was her sister Olympe's son, challenged one of Hortense's admirers to a duel and killed him. In France, this was a huge scandal and people blamed Hortense for not being a better influence on him. Then in February of 1685, King Charles II died. His successor, James II and VII, continued to support Hortense financially, but he was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

• 48:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  A year later, on April 15th, 1689, Marie's husband Lorenzo Inoffrio Colonna died. And as a widow, Marie finally had some of the freedom that she had been trying to get for herself for most of her life. She reconnected with her sons and she traveled. She also reconnected with her old friend Ortensia Stella, who had been one of her ladies in waiting and who also was one of the women that Lorenzo had had an affair with. Lorenzo and Ortensia Stella had two children that Lorenzo had formally recognized. And these two women each worked to help the other one out with various issues that were related to Lorenzo's estate.

• 48:58Holly Frey?

  Well, we kind of both got in this mess.

• 49:03Holly Frey?

  Possibly inspired by Lorenzo's death, Armand sued Hortense in 1689. During a formal separation hearing, he vilified her as a gambler and libertine. And the legal arguments surrounding the hearing were published afterward. The case was decided in the duke's favor and Hortense was ordered to return to France. First to a convent and then to her husband, and she said she would rather die.

• 49:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  It was not possible for Armand to force Hortense to return, though. It might have been, except that the Nine Years' War had started the year before and England and France were at war with one another. Hortense just defied this order and stayed where she was, although she had to move into smaller and smaller lodgings as her money dwindled.

• 49:53Holly Frey?

  By June of 1699, Hortense was described as increasingly depressed, including drinking too much, not eating enough, and deeply in debt.

• 50:04Holly Frey?

  She died on July 2nd, 1699. John Evelyn wrote about it in his diary on the 11th, describing her as, quote, "an extraordinary beauty and wit, but dissolute and impatient of matrimonial restraint."

• 50:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  After paying off her debts, Armand had Hortense's body embalmed and returned to France. He took it through what seems like an intentionally planned, roundabout, and very long route, traveling through places that he knew that she hated to get there.

• 50:37Holly Frey?

  The drama. Marie Mancini's last years seemed to have been more comfortable and happier than her sisters. She did not have much of her own, but her sons were generous with her. She traveled when things like the Nine Years' War weren't making it too dangerous to do so. She died in Pisa on May 8th, 1715, and she was buried there. She had asked to be buried wherever it was she happened to be when she died. Her first love, Louis XIV, died a few months later.

• 51:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  There are lots of books about Hortense Mancini and Marie Mancini and others of their sisters and the affair of the poisons that's come up a couple of times. One of the books that's focused just on Hortense and Marie is The King's Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin. That came out in 2012. There's also a pretty new translation of their groundbreaking memoirs, which came out in 2008 from the University of Chicago Press.

• 51:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 52:04Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 52:42Speaker 07

  Livright, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.

• 53:09Speaker 00

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