Ortensia (Hortense,
Duchesse de Mazarin) (1646-1699)
and Anna Maria (“Marie”, Princesse
de Colonna) Mancini (1640–1715):
two of five Italian sisters, all famed for their intelligence and beauty, but
these were the two who married immortality when their ephemeral marriages
failed, memoiring their years of travel around Europe, writing, and influencing
other writers, in abundance.
Ortensia is the one
most remembered in the English-speaking world, but I shall speak of Marie first,
because I want to start by returning briefly to Françoise d'Aubigné (see Nov 27), who took over as Louis XIV’s lover when Françoise-Athénaïs
de Rochechouart de Mortemart, the Marquise of Montespan, was removed after a poisoning scandal. There had already been lots of
women who concubined for Louis XIV, but the
very first was Marie, niece of the Chief Minister of France, Cardinal Jules Mazarin (see March 9). Louis would have married her, but both the Cardinal, and his Regent-mother Anne of Austria, were vehemently opposed, and the lovers’ meeting on June 22 1659 would
be their last before she was banished into exile.
Or to a life of endless grand-tourism actually, and to writing
about it in a series of travelogues that demonstrate what happens when you
write the book yourself, rather than following the methodology of Marco Polo and ibn-Battuta, and
use a ghost-writer. Marie first
married Prince Lorenzo Onofrio di Colonna, but then fled in the
wake of yet another poisoning scandal, though whether it was she trying to
poison him, or him her, depends on which of the many historical accounts you
choose to believe. She joined her sister in Rome, and they travelled everywhere
together.
Ortensia, or Hortense
when she was brought from Italy to France by her uncle as a child, was the
younger of the two. In 1661, aged just 15, she married Armand Charles de La Porte de La
Meilleraye,
and they received as a wedding gift from her uncle the title Duc et Duchesse de Mazarin; eight years later
the Cardinal died, and she and her four sisters co-inherited his vast fortune.
Her marriage from the outset had been apallingly abusive; in 1668 she could
take no more, and fled to Rome, expunging her trauma in a published book,
and encouraging the newly-arrived Marie
to do the same.
Several years of unaccompanied travel followed, the
only male involved with them the Duc de Savoie, who kept a protective eye from a courteous
distance, but wrote letters as and when required to safeguard them. Then he
died, and almost immediately a letter reached Hortense
from Ralph Montagu,
whom she had come to know when he was ambassador in Paris, inviting her, on
behalf of the English king Charles II, to spend Christmas in England. She
accepted, and soon enough became the latest of Charles II’s
official mistresses.
Marie and Hortense were merely unusual in having royal
lovers, but utterly unique at that time in abandoning abusive husbands, and
then going public about them in a book; and even more brave, even more unique,
to then set out on lengthy tours of Europe without male escorts. Both wrote
memoirs of their travels, but Hortense’s
real significance was her London salon, in a gorgeous house adjacent to St
James’s Palace, open equally to women and to men, and the openness not
just the door but even more importantly the minds, and the freedom to express
what was in them.
Marie’s letters can
be found here. Both of their
memoirs here.
Amber pages
This date poses a question that I haven't asked before - or maybe I have, but not quite in this way. The trigger is:Today in 1342 (Shire Reckoning), Bilbo Baggins returned to his home at Bag End.
I would have no issue with, say, "21st September 1937, publication of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien" - a book that has acquired considerable status in the world of teenage literature, and therefore merits the commemoration. But this elevates the events of the novel to the status of history.
But then, what about:
April 1st 1375 BCE, Moses leaves Egypt for Mount Sinai
(you can work out for yourselves how I calculated the day, month, year, but there is a logic to each one)
France fell to Germany in WWII, today in 1940. France falling to Germany had sadly become a national habit, ever since the rout of Napoleon switched the boots from the feet...
And precisely one year later, the event that would start the commencement of the beginning of the end: Germany invaded Russia, today in 1941.
And anyway: why would you name anything after Charon! Charon is the Prime Minister of Hell isn't he, the one who guides the dead into the hands of the devil Phalange, across the rivers Sabra and Shatilla. No? Have I got my history and my politics and my mythology mixed up?
So I looked him up, just in case, and it turns out that I do have my Sharon (see Sept 16) mixed up with my Charon, who may actually be Kharon, or Acheron (and even, in some accounts which may be fictional, Sauron, though in the realms of the dead there is also Vol De Mort), and what I appear to have done, foolishly, so foolishly, is to slip into the error of anti-Semitism (anti-Zionism as a cover for anti-Semitism, same thing really). "Kharon was depicted in ancient Greek art as an ugly, bearded man with a crooked nose, wearing a conical hat and tunic..."
And that is definitely a description of Sharon, the cartoon character from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (see August 26), the traditional image of the European Jew. Do you see how deeply embedded it is? Fact posing as fiction, fiction posing as fact. The mythology of science.
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