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Marie Mancini Writing for Her Life
Sarah Nelson
To cite this article: Sarah Nelson (2021): Marie Mancini Writing for Her Life, Early Modern French
Studies, DOI: 10.1080/20563035.2021.1898863
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2021.1898863
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Marie Mancini Writing for Her Life
Sarah Nelson
University of Idaho, USA
If Marie Mancini, niece of Louis XIV’s chief minister Cardinal Mazarin, has
come down through the ages, it has been because of her youthful love
affair with the king and the scandal she caused later. She and her sister Hor-
tense fled their marriages and travelled together and separately –but unac-
companied by the train their station demanded and unauthorised by their
husbands –across western Europe. They sought merely an independent exist-
ence. Marie Mancini was a reader, writer, and précieuse, but her surviving writ-
ings were produced in service of her real-life circumstances. This article
explores Marie’s tactics in pursuit of autonomy. It examines her delicate pos-
ition as she sought to argue her case; it maps the strategy of her published
memoir and describes the particularity of her authorial voice; and it takes
the measure of her success in staking a claim, both in her own time and in
ours.
keywords Marie Mancini, early modern, women writers, life writing, Lorenzo
Onofrio Colonna, memoir, letters
Marie Mancini lived in a condition of both great power and radical powerlessness:
she was a high noble woman in seventeenth-century Europe. She was one of the
nieces and nephews of Louis XIV’s chief minister Cardinal Mazarin, whom that
‘foreign parvenu’imported from their native Rome to the French court, so that
he could shore up his position by marrying them into key families of the French
nobility. Marie is still famous as Louis’first love, the woman he was prevented
from marrying by Mazarin and the queen mother, Anne of Austria. The scene of
their tearful parting figures in the greatest hits of royal romance. Later, she and
her sister Hortense became figures of scandal when they fled their marriages and
travelled together and separately –but unaccompanied by the train and equipage
that their station demanded, and unauthorised by their husbands –across much
of western Europe. The object of their desire in that quest seems modest in the
extreme today for many of the world’s women (though as elusive as ever for
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as
Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCom-
mercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-
commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
DOI 10.1080/20563035.2021.1898863
early modern french studies, 2021, 1–16
many others): they simply wanted to live independently, with control over their own
movements and living conditions.
To the extent that she has come down through the ages at all, Marie has been
known as Louis XIV’s first love and later in her life, as an ‘illustre aventurière.’
1
The written traces of her own voice that have survived to today remain mostly
hidden, and her writings tell a story in themselves: her ‘scientific’writings on
astrology have been nearly lost;
2
her memoir was prompted by the publication of
a false memoir under her name, and then the version of her authentic memoir
that was re-edited from the seventeenth until the late twentieth century was a
thoroughly rewritten version by a male editor; her own seventeenth-century text
is nearly non-existent, and the twentieth-century reprint is not widely available;
and her correspondence has never been catalogued or published. Marie’s voice
was and is muffled, but it repays the effort to attend to it.
Marie Mancini was a reader, a writer, and a précieuse,
3
but her surviving writings were
all produced in the service of her real-life circumstances. This article explores Marie’s
tactics in pursuing her objective of an independent life. It examines the particularly deli-
cate position in which she found herself as she sought to argue her case; it maps the strat-
egy of her published memoir and describes the particularity of her authorial voice; and it
takes the measure of her success in staking a claim, both in her own time and in ours.
Marie’s delicate position
Marie Mancini, Constabless Colonna, after having fled her marital home in Rome in
May 1672 and travelled in secret to France with her sister Hortense, who was a fugitive
from her own marriage, wrote in a letter to her husband, Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna:
As for my decision to withdraw to France, it was prompted only by the worries I had
about my health; and, as well, by what my brother said several times, to me and to
others, about the designs someone had against me. (I could say more but will keep
silent, for you would not want such things to be common knowledge.)
4
In another letter, written in August 1672 from Grenoble, Marie told Lorenzo:
You have never been very fair to me, and yet even now you want to make me responsible
for the fact that everyone is blaming you; I know that no one can truthfully say that I
ever complained about you in connection with the suspicions you speak of. Had they
1
The appellation comes from a 1701 republication of Hortense’s memoir together with a memoir that was
falsely attributed to Marie, using the same fictitious imprint under which each of those texts was originally
published, ‘À Cologne, chez Pierre du Marteau.’
2
At least one copy of her Discorso astrosofico delle mutationi de’tempi e d’altri accidenti mondani dell’anno
MDCLXXII does exist, in the Bavarian State Library in Munich.
3
It was her own secretary, Antoine Baudeau, sieur de Somaize, who published the two-volume Grand diction-
naire des prétieuses in 1661, with a page on her, ‘Maximiliane.’
4
This is from one of several letters translated from the original Italian by Giovanna Suhl and included in the
appendix of the modern reprint edition of Marie’s memoir: La Vérité dans son jour, ed. by Patricia Francis
Cholakian and Elizabeth C. Goldsmith (Delmar, New York: Scholars’Facsimiles & Reprints, 1998), p. 95.
Marie Mancini’s correspondence is held in the Colonna family archive, housed in the library of the Benedic-
tine monastery of Santa Scolastica in Subiaco, Italy.
2SARAH NELSON
been confirmed, I would not have been so imprudent as to publicize them, and had they
not, I would not have had the meanness to invent them. Saint Simon is a real liar if he
says that I ever complained about you other than for the scant esteem and affection I
really got from you, and he forced me to admit even that.
5
Marie is writing a private letter to her husband, who is presumably intimately
involved in her reasons for making a surreptitious escape from their home, and
yet even in this one-to-one communication, she writes, ‘I could say more but will
keep silent, for you would not want such things to be common knowledge.’We
modern email writers would do well always to be as conscious as Marie is here
of the vulnerabilities of our ‘private’communications. Clearly, she is aware that
anything she sets down in writing may possibly fall into unintended hands and
become public knowledge.
So what were, exactly, these ‘designs someone had against [her],’and these ‘sus-
picions [Lorenzo spoke] of’? Marie was a bit more explicit in another letter to
Lorenzo: ‘I can’t keep people from talking, but for my part, I have never mentioned
the word “poison”.’
6
Historian Claude Dulong explains that Marie suspected her
husband of trying to poison her.
7
The relations between Marie and Lorenzo had
been close and affectionate at the start of their marriage in 1661 –surprisingly
enough, given that Marie had been more or less forced into it after her hopes of mar-
rying Louis XIV had been dashed. But after the birth of their third son in 1665,
Marie had insisted on a separazione di letto. The explanation she put forward in
her memoir was that she was afraid she might not survive another pregnancy,
after the difficult delivery of their third child. The alternative explanations contem-
plated by various biographers include an astrologer’s prediction that Marie would
not survive the birth of a fourth child; concerns related to the division of inheri-
tances; a report that Lorenzo had fathered another child who was born at nearly
the same time; and Marie’s general jealousy over Lorenzo’s amorous adventures.
There is a constant gap between the official story and the hidden story. This is the
case for every person everywhere and at every period of history,but it is particularly
the case for a person with the prominence of Marie Mancini. Both she and Hortense
were international celebrities and subjects of scandal in court gossip across much of
western Europe in the latter decades of the seventeenth century. International celeb-
rities, thanks to their proximity to the seats of power in France and other great
realms, and subjects of scandal, thanks to their outlandish escapades. For their sur-
vival, they needed sources of maintenance and of protection against pursuit by their
husbands, and they appealed for these to kings and dukes in France, Italy, England,
and Spain. The audacity of the sisters’gambit in leaving their marriages and travel-
ling unaccompanied across land and sea was redoubled when, three and five years
into their lives as fugitives, the sisters each went public with her story by publishing
a memoir under her own name for all and sundry to read. This was entirely unpre-
cedented. The speed with which translations were published from the original
5
Ibid., p. 96.
6
C. Dulong, Marie Mancini. La première passion de Louis XIV (Paris: Perrin, 1993, 2002), p. 201. Dulong
quotes the letter in French translation; the English here is mine.
7
Ibid., pp. 181–82.
MARIE MANCINI WRITING FOR HER LIFE 3
French into Italian, Spanish, and English attests to the interest of the reading public.
In fact, the very existence of the second memoir –Marie’s–is due to that interest,
since she only wrote her book to counter a false one circulating under her name,
apparently written by someone who knew her and who sought to capitalise on
the success of Hortense’s memoir, which had appeared a year earlier.
On one hand, it is puzzling why noblewomen of high rank such as the Mancini
sisters, after having caused scandal by running away, would risk further degra-
dation of their reputations by publishing their life writing. Women of their class,
if they wrote about themselves at all, allowed their writing to circulate only in
manuscript form within a highly restricted society of their peers. These were two
women who dared to take unconventional steps, though: women of their class
also did not travel about Europe sometimes disguised as men, evading detention
by authorities or agents of their husbands, but the Mancini sisters did. The influence
of print culture on all levels of society was beginning to take hold in a new way at
the time when they chose to publish their memoirs in the 1670s. Elizabeth Gold-
smith calls them ‘arguably the first media celebrities, in the earliest years of journal-
ism, when news of prominent people and current events was just beginning to be
given circulation in print.’
8
Indeed, in the mid-seventeenth century, printed weekly gazettes were going into
circulation in France and elsewhere in Europe, reporting current developments in
the worlds of politics, diplomacy, and the life of the court. Gazettes were supplant-
ing private correspondence as the primary sources of information for the public.
9
By choosing to publish their life writing, the Mancini sisters were recognising
and participating in this movement toward print culture and toward a mass
market for political news and news about prominent people. No longer were
their personal reputations merely a topic for gossip at court; the ordinary reading
public now knew their names and could follow their escapades. Thus, they both
cite in the opening lines of their books the main reason for their publishing: to
defend their reputations, which had been publicly besmirched. In both women’s
struggles to win independence from their husbands –Hortense’s struggle was con-
ducted primarily in the courts of law, and Marie’s, in the royal courts –their pub-
lished texts were introduced as evidence, sometimes in their favour and sometimes
against them. Hortense published first, in 1675, and her book, Mémoires
D.M.L.D.M. [de Madame la Duchesse Mazarin], was a commercial success. In
1676, a book that purported to be Marie’s memoirs came out under a similar
title and the same fictitious imprint as Hortense’s book: Mémoires de
M.L.P.M.M [Madame la Princesse Marie Mancini] Colonne, G. Connétable du
Royaume de Naples, Cologne, Pierre Marteau. It was clearly written by someone
familiar with Marie’s life in Rome; it related details and incidents from her time
there, conveying an image of her as frivolous, immoral, and arrogant. When
8
E. C. Goldsmith, The Kings’Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and her
Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin (New York: Public Affairs, 2012), p. 225.
9
S. Haffemayer, ‘Transferts culturels dans la presse européenne au XVIIe siècle,’Le Temps des médias,11
(2008/2), 25. doi:10.3917/tdm.011.0025.
4SARAH NELSON
Marie learned of this book, she disavowed it angrily, and she cited its existence as
the reason for her choosing to publish a genuine memoir.
As noted above, there is a consistent gap between the ‘official’story –the published
accountofMarie’s life, and the remarks she made in public –and the hidden story,
which is presumably closer to the truth. She titled her memoir La Vérité dans son
jour,orThe Truth in Its Own Light, making an assertive claim of truth for her official
story, against the ‘lies’of the spurious text that had been published under her name.
Her strategy in publishing her story was to convince the reading public that she,
rather than the author of the earlier book, was the real Marie Mancini and that
what she related in her book was the truth of who she was and what she had
done. It was important for her to be convincing, not primarily to the reading
public, but first and foremost to the privileged readers who were the powerful
people in whose hands her destiny lay –her husband, her former lover the king of
France, and the monarchs and nobles in Spain, where she was living at the time
she wrote the book. For her ultimate objective was to find some way of living inde-
pendently and with freedom of movement, and for that, she needed the support of
powerful intercessors. When we read her memoir in tandem with the letters she
was writing continually to her husband all the while she was running from him,
we get the sense of an ongoing chess match between them; and because of their
high station, it was a chess match that involved real knights and bishops, kings
and queens. Part of Marie’s dilemma was that she had been forced onto the public
square by the spurious memoir, which required a published text to counter it. But
the very act of publishing her story was likely to irritate those powerful people
who would appear in it –above all Louis XIV and Lorenzo Colonna. Marie’stask
was exceedingly delicate: she needed to reveal enough detail to prove that she was
the real Marie Mancini, while remaining as decorous, respectable, and ‘lady-like’
as possible …which meant saying as little as she could about private matters.
10
The strategy behind Marie’s publication
This dilemma led to the rhetorical tactics Marie used most prominently in her text.
She laid out her thinking on the dilemma in a letter to Lorenzo, in which she
explained her treatment of the love affair with Louis XIV in her memoir.
I have been obliged (to counter the ridiculous and impertinent story that is circulating under
my name) to give to the printer a true relation of my life. I am sendin g you the first pages of it.
As far as the king is concerned, I could not have explained myself in less detail,because we are
dealing with such public events that it would be worse to keep silent about it. Also, everyone
knows already of the good intentions that his majesty held toward me, so if they do not see it,
they will gossip about what was a decent courtship.
11
10
This is one of the central discussions in Patricia Cholakian’s chapter on Marie’s memoir in her book Women
and the Politics of Self-Representation in Seventeenth-Century France (Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 2000), pp. 107 ff.
11
Translation from the original Spanish by Cholakian and Goldsmith; quoted in the introduction to their
edition of La Vérité dans son jour, p. 10, and also in E. C. Goldsmith, Publishing Women’s Life Stories
in France, 1647–1720: From Voice to Print (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 121–22.
MARIE MANCINI WRITING FOR HER LIFE 5
That section in the memoir evokes the love affair in terms such as these:
This would be an apt place in which to speak of the sentiments that people said His
Majesty had in my favor, if modesty did not prevent me. And for the same reason, I
will not elaborate on the palpable sadness that this prince felt when he saw me leave,
after which he withdrew for a week to Chantilly and did nothing but send couriers
to me, the first of whom was a musketeer bearing five letters of several pages each.
12
As in the letter to Lorenzo quoted at the opening of this article, Marie here makes a
show of knowing something that she refuses to tell. This sort of paraleiptic gesture
occurs elsewhere in the memoir, too, when Marie demurs to relate details, while
suggesting that she could tell much more. This approach is a response to her
dilemma, which demands that she both reveal and conceal at the same time. It is
a nod to the powerful people she wants to placate. For the ordinary reader, the
gesture may be less than persuasive, since one may remain unconvinced by what
an author refuses to tell, but Marie’s concern for the reactions of the reading
public was doubtless secondary in her mind.
‘I will not elaborate on the palpable sadness that this prince felt when he saw me
leave.’Marie is at once drawing attention to something hidden (her love affair with
the king) and refusing to reveal it. But she is also claiming to refuse to reveal it,
while revealing it: ‘…after which he withdrew for a week to Chantilly and did
nothing but send couriers to me, the first of whom was a musketeer bearing five
letters of several pages each.’After claiming she will not, she goes right ahead
and elaborates on the king’s palpable sadness by mentioning his retreat to Chantilly
and his constant stream of love letters to her.
The reader’s impression of disingenuousness on the part of the author is fairly
slight in this passage, but over the course of the memoir, a reader’s confidence in
Marie tends to flag, not so much because of a perception of untruthfulness, but
rather because of her repeated rash actions. The result is a sort of destabilisation
of the narrative. A ‘stable’narrative rests on the reader’s ability to trust the author-
ial voice, to trust that it is knowledgeable, truthful, prudent, reliable –i.e. that it is
trustworthy. Marie makes frequent claims of these qualities for herself and her nar-
rative. Patricia Cholakian takes Marie at her word and emphasises the utter,
unvarnished frankness of Marie’s account of her actions. For Cholakian, it is
Marie’s actual truthfulness that leads Claude Dulong, for example, to say, ‘Every
time Marie opens her mouth, one would like to cry, “Shut up!”before she has a
chance to speak. But alas! …’
13
Cholakian takes issue with this negative judgement
of Marie’s text, emphasising the originality of such an honest self-appraisal.
12
H. Mancini and M. Mancini, Memoirs, ed. by Sarah Nelson, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe
Series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 96. The original French:
Ce serait ici un endroit à parler des pensées que l’on dit que Sa Majesté a eues en ma faveur, si la mod-
estie ne me le défendait. Et par la même raison, je ne m’étendrai pas sur les sensibles déplaisirs que ce
Prince eut de me voir partir, se retirant huit jours à Chantilly, et ne songeant qu’à me dépêcher des
courriers, dont le premier fut un mousquetaire, chargé de cinq lettres de plusieurs pages chacune.
La Vérité, p. 41.
13
Dulong, p. 222; quoted in English translation in Cholakian, Women and the Politics of Self-Representation,
p. 120.
6SARAH NELSON
That is certainly a valid way of reading Marie’s text, and yet, the overall
impression the reader gets from her unending stream of ill-advised actions followed
by regrets is that the authorial voice is less than trustworthy, since that voice osten-
sibly emanates from a person whose judgement seems seriously flawed. Further-
more, the text leads readers through Marie’s manoeuvrings, tricks, and escapes –
from Rome, from Lorenzo’s agents, from various convents –and as such, it tends
to undermine its own claims of sincerity and truthfulness. In a letter to Lorenzo
in 1675, Marie wrote:
After I wrote this, the mail coach was delayed, and this gives me a chance to tell you that
Don Ferdinando, to discredit me and to ensure that they would keep me in custody,
invented the story that I was planning to flee with the Turkish woman the other
night and that one of the nuns was supposed to open the doors for me, and he, allegedly
to prevent this, went to the Presidente and many highly-placed ministers so that they
would obtain a decree from the Queen and send guards to surround the convent. …
[S]uch an idea never entered my mind; …he, wanting to make sure that I could not
leave the convent, fabricates whatever he wants in order to compel you to hold me
here by force.
14
Marie avoids accusing Lorenzo of anything in her letter and instead attributes the
treachery to his half-brother and surrogate, Don Ferdinando Colonna. In her
memoir she is even more oblique:
On top of that, certain malicious individuals, in order to do me a bad turn and thereby
gain [the constable Colonna’s] good graces, wrote to him that I wanted to run away and
that I would do it inevitably if I were not closely watched.
15
She is protesting this unjust false report about her –this ‘fake news!’–but in the
very next sentence, she goes on to say:
These rumors, together with the other reasons I have declared above, made me decide to
go out of the convent, to show that the efforts to hold me would keep me locked up
there only so long as I was willing. So one day when Don Ferdinand had gone out
with all my servants, I had my maids open in an instant—and it was my maids, mind
you—those strong, those thick, and those high walls which the author of my history
contends were the only obstacle to my flight.
16
‘The author of my history’is the anonymous writer who had so infuriated Marie by
publishing the false memoir under her name; that seething subtext for everything she
14
Appendix to La Vérité, p. 99.
15
Memoirs, pp. 162–63. ‘Outre cela quelques malintentionnés, pour me rendre de mauvais offices, et gagner
par là ses bonnes grâces, lui écrivirent, que je voulais m’enfuir, et qu’infailliblement je le ferais si l’on ne
m’observait de près.’La Vérité, p. 87.
16
Memoirs, p. 163.
Ces bruits joints aux autres raisons que j’ai déclarées plus haut, me firent prendre la résolution de
sortir du couvent, pour faire voir que les soins à me garder ne m’y tiendraient enfermée, qu’autant
et si longtemps que je voudrais, et un jour que don Ferdinand était sorti avec tous mes gens, je fis
ouvrir en un instant, et par mes filles, ces fortes, ces épaisses, et ces hautes murailles que l’auteur de
mon histoire dit avoir été l’unique obstacle à ma fuite. La Vérité, p. 87.
MARIE MANCINI WRITING FOR HER LIFE 7
writes resurfaces here, as she points once again to the story she wants her readers not
to believe. Outraged both by what she says are Don Ferdinando’s false reports about
her intention to escape, and by the spurious memoirist’s contention that she is unable
to escape, Marie escapes. She recounts how she was eventually persuaded by various
Spanish nobles to give in and return to the convent, only to break out once again a
few months later. When that time, too, her noble advocates prevailed upon her to
return to the convent, the nuns (who were supposed to have been granted a privilege
from the crown, by which they were not required to accept lay women such as Marie
into their convent) protested adamantly against letting her back inside. Marie’s
account of the scene is highly entertaining:
[S]everal nuns who had recognized me as soon as I had taken off my mantle began to fill
the air with their cries, pouring out to the Nuncio all their displeasure at seeing their
privileges violated. …[It took him some time to quiet] the din that the differences
between factions had raised among them. …That day I sided with the faction who
opposed me, and despite my despair over the violence that was being done to me, I
took pleasure in their division, and to foment it I pointed out to them how strange
and unheard-of it was that there should be so little regard shown for their privileges,
and that as if it were not enough that these had been violated when they were
obliged to receive me the first time, they had been compelled to do it again after my
first exit, and they were being forced to do it once more after my second.
17
As she admits in the passage, Marie clearly delights in sowing discord in life, and
in her writing about that life, she does not shy away from this trait in herself, but
writes amusingly about it. One glimpses here the mix of sharp elbows and sharp
wit for which Marie was renowned. Her own perverse character is yet another
factor that tends to destabilise her narrative and undermine her efforts at gaining
independence.
On Marie’s perverse character
Part of the charm of Marie’s memoir is what Patricia Cholakian regards as her uncom-
mon honesty about her own shortcomings. She recounts occasion upon occasion
17
Memoirs, p. 168.
[P]lusieurs religieuses m’ayant reconnue, d’abord que j’eus levé ma mante, commencèr-
ent à remplir l’air de leurs cris, disant au Nonce, tout ce que le déplaisir de voir violer
leurs privilèges leur pût inspirer, …[Il lui fallut un temps pour apaiser] le tintamarre que
la différence des partis avait excité parmi elles, …Je me rangeai ce jour-là du parti qui
m’était contraire, et malgré le désespoir où j’étais de la violence que l’on me faisait, je me
fis un plaisir de leur division, et leur représentai pour la fomenter, que c’était une chose
étrange, et inouïe que l’on eût si peu d’égards à leurs privilèges, et que ne se contentant
pas de les avoir violés en les obligeant à me recevoir la première fois, on les y eût contra-
int encore après ma première sortie, et qu’on les y forçât de nouveau après la seconde.
La Vérité, p. 90.
8SARAH NELSON
where she succeeds in antagonising the very people on whose sympathy her interests
depend. Even as a young child, by her account, she was at once perceptive ofwhat such
people desired of her and yet loath to give them what they wanted. In the first pages of
her memoir, she asserts that when her uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, directed his two sisters
to come from Rome to the French court and to bring their eldest daughters, Marie’s
mother looked for some excuse to bring the younger Hortense instead of Marie,
since Marie contends that the mother preferred Hortense for her beauty.
[S]he would doubtless have been delighted if I had refused to obey him; it was not dif-
ficult for me to guess this by the choice she gave me to go to France or to stay in Rome
with my aunt and to dedicate myself to God in a cloister, asking me very carefully if I
had not made some vow which might bind me, and thinking of everything that could
possibly oblige me to return to the convent. Whereupon I remember that I replied to
her that there were convents everywhere, and that if it should please heaven to
inspire such pious impulses in me, it would be as easy to follow them in Paris as in
Rome; besides which I was not yet of an age to make a choice of such importance.
18
When Marie arrived in Italy to meet her new husband, Lorenzo Colonna, after a
difficult journey from the French court, it was her husband’s brother-in-law who
pretended to be Lorenzo, while Colonna himself hung back and observed her.
Marie was unfavourably impressed by the brother-in-law and didn’t hesitate to
remark to one of her maids that ‘if this was the husband who had been chosen
for [her, she] did not want him and he could make himself another match.’
19
In
this way, she managed to make an enemy of the brother-in-law from her very
arrival, so much so that Dulong speculates that he may well have been the source
of the false memoir, which rendered such a negative image of her that it spurred
Marie to write La Vérité dans son jour.
Later, when Marie was on the road, the stakes were significantly higher in her
interactions with potential benefactors or detractors, and yet her antagonising tic
remained just as forceful as before. She recounts candidly her missteps with the
Minister of Finance, Colbert, whose assistance she sought in her appeals to the king.
Nevertheless, as fortune cannot suffer me to enjoy for long the advantages I possess, it
decided to use me against myself and to trouble my repose with the feelings of resent-
ment and grief that it inspired in me against the king, causing me to write Monsieur
Colbert a letter complaining of His Majesty’s lack of kindness toward me, to which I
added that since he refused to allow me to go to Paris, he might at least grant me the
18
Memoirs, p. 85.
[Elle] sans doute eût été bien aise que j’eusse refusé de lui obéir; ce qu’il ne me fut pas difficile de juger
par le choix qu’elle me donna d’aller en France, ou de rester à Rome auprès de ma tante, et de me con-
sacrer à Dieu dans un cloître, me demandant avec grand soin si je n’avais point fait de vœu qui m’y
engageât, et n’oubliant rien de tout ce qui pouvait m’y obliger. Sur quoi je me souviens que je lui répon-
dis, qu’il y avait partout des couvents, et que quand il plairait au Ciel de m’inspirer ces pieux mouve-
ments, il serait aussi aisé de les suivre à Paris, qu’à Rome; outre que je n’étais point encore en âge de
faire un choix de cette importance. La Vérité, p. 34.
19
Memoirs, p. 103. ‘[S]i c’était là l’époux, que l’on m’avait destiné, que je n’en voulais point et qu’il pourrait
prendre parti ailleurs.’La Vérité, p. 45.
MARIE MANCINI WRITING FOR HER LIFE 9
freedom to go anywhere else I pleased. This letter, which Monsieur Colbert showed to
His Majesty, made him supremely angry with me, and my enemies, taking this oppor-
tunity to stoke the fire, impressed upon him that I was too close to Paris, that from one
hour to the next I could escape and go there; and with their malicious insinuations they
convinced him to give Monsieur Colbert the order to tell me on his behalf that I should
choose a convent sixty leagues from Paris, and that after the letter I had written, I did
not deserve his protection.
This response showed me only too well the mistake I had made, and I repented, though
belatedly, of my fit of pique. I wrote to Monsieur Colbert that in truth I should not have
written the letter I had sent him, but that neither should he have shown it to the king,
and that since he had brought his indignation down on me by showing it to him, he
should now take it upon himself to placate him by pointing out to him the regret I
felt over my imprudence, and in short that he should ask him to pardon my mistake.
20
This is one of a great many passages in Marie’s memoir where she recounts some
headstrong action she took, followed quickly by her regret of that action. But
here, as elsewhere, the recognition of her own fault is intertwined with recrimina-
tion: she ultimately blames Colbert here for the unfavourable position where her
letter to the king has landed her.
In her interpersonal negotiations, conflicting aspects of Marie’s character are
forever at odds. The off-putting traits are her petulance, recriminations, and
intense regard for her own status, even as she travels across country in wildly
reduced circumstances. She relates that when the duc de Créqui, former French
ambassador to Rome, meets with her in her room in a shabby inn, he comments
on the vast difference between that setting and the last time he’d seen her, in the
Colonna palace. But even in that humble condition, she refuses to relinquish her
image of herself, and so when the Archbishop of Reims –the brother of Louis
XIV’s Secretary of State for War, Louvois –comes as an emissary, she refuses to
confide in him, ‘because of the difference there was between us.’
21
Marie considers
20
Memoirs, p. 143.
Cependant comme la fortune ne peut souffrir que je jouisse longtemps du bien que je possède, elle
s’avisa de se servir de moi, contre moi-même, et de troubler mon repos par des sentiments de dépit
et de chagrin qu’elle m’inspira contre le Roi, me faisant écrire à M. Colbert, une lettre de plaintes
du peu de complaisance que Sa Majesté avait pour moi, auxquelles j’ajoutais, que puisqu’elle ne
voulait pas me donner la liberté d’aller à Paris, elle m’accordât au moins celle d’aller partout ailleurs
où je voudrais. Cette lettre que M. Colbert fit voir à Sa Majesté l’irrita tout à fait contre moi, et mes
ennemis prenant cette occasion pour allumer davantage son feu, lui représentèrent que j’étais trop près
de Paris, que d’une heure à l’autre je pourrais m’échapper, et m’y rendre, et par leurs malicieuses insin-
uations l’engagèrent à donner ordre à M. Colbert de me dire de sa part, que je choisisse un couvent à
soixante lieues de Paris, et qu’après la lettre que j’avais écrite, je ne méritais pas sa protection. Cette
réponse ne me fit que trop voir la faute que j’avais faite, et je me repentis, quoique tard, de mon empor-
tement, et écrivis à M. Colbert, qu’à la vérité j’avais mal fait d’écrire la lettre que je lui avais envoyée,
mais qu’il n’avait pas mieux fait de la montrer au Roi, et que puisqu’il m’avait attiré son indignation,
en la lui faisant voir, il se chargeât à présent de l’apaiser, en lui remontrant le déplaisir où j’étais de mon
imprudence, et qu’enfin il lui demandât pardon de ma faute. La Vérité, pp. 73–74.
21
Memoirs, p. 144. ‘…sur la différence qu’il y avait.’La Vérité, p. 74.
10 SARAH NELSON
herself vastly superior to him. Claude Dulong regards this as perhaps Marie’s most
monumental gaffe of all.
22
And yet, if Marie was Louis’first love, whom he’d wished ardently to marry, it
was because she was also marvellously witty. It is reported that when Marie
received two purses full of money sent by Colbert on behalf of the King, with the
command that she stay well away from Paris, she replied that she’d certainly
heard of women receiving money to see a man, but she’d never heard of them
being paid not to.
23
Marie’s wit illuminates the text of her memoir, and it is all the more evident when
one compares her own version –the text published in 1677 under the title La Vérité
dans son jour, ou les véritables mémoires de M. Manchini, Connétable Colonne –
with the apparently unauthorised edition prepared by a certain Sébastien
Brémond and published in 1678 as Apologie, ou les Véritables mémoires de Mme
Marie Mancini, connétable de Colonna, écrits par elle-même. It is notable, and
regrettable, that the latter edition was the one that was republished over the centu-
ries, until 1998 when Cholakian and Goldsmith prepared a faithful edition of La
Vérité dans son jour. Consider again, for example, that account by Marie of the
uproar she caused among the nuns in Madrid who found themselves obliged to
house her in their convent, against their will and despite her repeated disruptive
escapes from the confines of the convent. In La Vérité dans son jour, the passage
appears as follows:
Je me rangeai ce jour-là du parti qui m’était contraire, et malgré le désespoir où j’étais de
la violence que l’on me faisait, je me fis un plaisir de leur division, et leur représentai
pour la fomenter, que c’était une chose étrange, et inouïe que l’on eût si peu d’égards
à leurs privilèges, et que ne se contentant pas de les avoir violés en les obligeant à me
recevoir la première fois, on les y eût contraint encore après ma première sortie, et
qu’on les y forçât de nouveau après la seconde.
24
Compare this to the version by Brémond:
Pour moi, je me mis ce jour-là du côté du parti qui m’était le plus contraire, et, malgré le
désespoir où me mettait la violence qu’on me faisait, je ne laissai pas de prendre un sin-
gulier plaisir à cette division. Et, ainsi, pour la fomenter, je leur représentai que c’était
une chose étrange et inouïe qu’elles fissent si peu de cas de leurs privilèges, et que, ne se
contentant pas de les avoir rompus en les obligeant de me recevoir la première fois,
qu’ils les forçassent de nouveau de m’admettre dans leur couvent pour la seconde.
25
22
Dulong, pp. 222–23.
23
Dulong relates the anecdote (p. 212), which she may have taken from Lucien Perey [pseudonym of Clara
Adèle Luce Herpin], Une princesse romaine au XVIIe siècle. Marie Mancini Colonna d’après des documents
inédits (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1896), p. 172. Perey cites aletter from Madame de Scudéry toBussy-Rabutin
reporting Marie’s retort: ‘Elle répondit plaisamment …qu’elle avait bien ouï dire qu’on donnait de l’argent
aux dames pour les voir, mais jamais pour ne les voir point.’
24
La Vérité, p. 90.
25
Mémoires d’Hortense et de Marie Mancini, ed. by Gérard Doscot, Le Temps retrouvé Series (Paris: Mercure
de France, 1965, 1987, 2003), pp. 197–98.
MARIE MANCINI WRITING FOR HER LIFE 11
As he does throughout his edition of the work, Brémond flattens Marie’stextin
several ways. He introduces commonplace expressions which distort her more
frank and unornamented style: ‘un singulier plaisir’replaces ‘un plaisir.’He subtly
reduces the agency of the narrative voice: ‘le désespoir où me mettait’replaces ‘le dése-
spoir où j’étais,’and ‘je ne laissai pas de prendre un singulier plaisir’replaces ‘je me fis
un plaisir.’Most significantly, he actually changes the sense of the text. Marie says
that she foments the nuns’divisions by pointing out how outrageous it was that
others (presumably the royal and papal authorities) had shown so little regard for
the sisters’privileges. Indeed, the Spanish convents were supposed to have gained
from the crown the exemption from being obliged to take in secular ladies such as
Marie. Brémond chooses to misconstrue Marie’s‘on’as ‘elles’and thus to have
Marie accuse the sisters themselves of ignoring their own privileges. It could be
argued that Brémond seeks to improve on Marie’s text by having her level the accusa-
tion at the nuns themselves, reasoning that this would indeed foment more division
amongst them. However, I argue first of all that Brémond’s manipulation of
Marie’s account is clearly a misreading of what she says, as evidenced by the inexplic-
able choice to translate her consistent ‘on’first as ‘elles’(‘que l’on eût si peu d’égards à
leurs privilèges’becomes ‘qu’elles fissent si peu de cas de leurs privilèges’)andthenas
‘ils’(‘on les y eût contraint’becomes ‘ils les forçassent’). Moreover, I contend that
Marie’s version is the wittier by far, and it is a classic example of her playing one
side off of another in pursuit of her own ends (though she is often unsuccessful in
the manoeuvre). Brémond sets her in frank conflict with the nuns, which is indeed
the truth of her relationship with them. But the humour of the passage in Marie’s
text is that she adopts a rhetorical stance in which she aligns herself with the nuns
against the powers who have been imposing Marie’s own noisome presence on
them. Everyone –Marie, the nuns, the secular and religious authorities on the
scene, and of course, the reader of the memoir –everyone knows very well that
Marie’s rhetorical pose is highly ironic. Brémond evacuates all of that irony, and
again at the end of the sentence, he flattens Marie’s voice, uninterested as he is in
the details of her story. He telescopes the tale into two simple phases –the nuns’obli-
gation to receive Marie in the first place, and then their obligation to let her back in
after her escape from the convent. However, the memoir has just recorded in consider-
able detail her two successive escapes and re-entries, and Marie’s mention of the three
phases of the nuns’humiliation heightens the piquant wit of the passage.
Marie’s voice muffled
The struggle to write her way to an independent life was an uphill battle for Marie.
Upon learning of, and soon thereafter reading, the memoir that had been published
in 1676 falsely purporting to have been written by her, she acted quickly to counter
it. She wrote to Lorenzo from Madrid that she found herself obliged by ‘the ridicu-
lous and impertinent story that is circulating under my name’to publish her own
account of her life.
26
She said in this letter, dated 4 March 1677, that she was
26
Cited above, [p. 5, n. 11]. Cholakian and Goldsmith cite these letters and summarize the publication history
of Marie’s memoir in their introduction to La Vérité dans son jour, pp. 9–13.
12 SARAH NELSON
sending along the first pages of her text, and in a letter dated 29 April 1677, she
reported that she had already sent the finished work to the printer. Marie’s sense
of urgency was such that she had neither sought royal authorisation for the publi-
cation nor circulated the manuscript for comment and approval prior to its print-
ing. She deflected what she assumed would be Lorenzo’s negative reaction to this
latter fact by protesting that even if she had taken the time to circulate it, nobody
–neither the King (Louis XIV) nor anyone else –could possibly have found fault
with it. Thus, we can ascertain that La Vérité dans son jour –the one version of
Marie’s story written entirely by her alone –was printed in the spring of 1677,
although no date or place of publication appeared on it. We also know that
Marie solicited the translation and publication of a Spanish edition, which
appeared as La Verdad en su luz, o las verdaderas memorias de Madama Maria
Manchini, Condestablesa Colona, published in Saragossa in 1677. The Spanish
text was sent to Lorenzo in two parts in July and August 1677 by Ferdinando
Colonna, the half-brother who acted as Lorenzo’s agent in Madrid and kept him
informed of Marie’s movements. In a letter dated 3 September 1677, Marie
remarked to Lorenzo that she was glad he had found the book good and that it
was much better in Spanish.
27
Marie did, then, exercise some control over her public image, inasmuch as she
was able to write and publish her own account of her actions and intentions, to
counter the spurious one in circulation. Furthermore, she evidently had a hand in
commissioning and approving the Spanish translation and bringing about its pub-
lication. However, after her text left her hands, it almost immediately caromed onto
a course that she does not appear to have charted. And if numbers of extant copies
of the various editions can be seen to represent their relative hold on the popular
imagination, it is clear that Marie’s authentic voice was all but drowned out in
her day by the accounts that preceded and followed hers, and still today it struggles
to be heard over them. Despite her meticulous research, Claude Dulong wrote in her
1993 biography of Marie that there were no copies in Paris’public libraries of the
first edition of her memoirs, and that Dulong was thus obliged to rely on excerpts of
it in the nineteenth-century biography by Lucien Perey, and on the thoroughly
revised Brémond version of Marie’s text that eclipsed the original almost as soon
as the original had appeared in print.
28
Marie’s letters bear no reference to the writer of court romances Sébastien
Brémond or to any projected revision of her book in French, and yet in 1678 in
Leiden, Brémond published his Apologie. He dedicated the volume to Ernst
August, Prince-Bishop of Osnabrück and Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg-Calenberg,
who was a close friend of both Marie and Lorenzo and who figured in her account
of her time in Italy. Brémond devotes a good part of the dedication to vaunting
Marie’s inimitable style:
27
The comment that the text was better in Spanish is presumably a reference to the fact that the Spanish
version introduced certain additions and stylistic changes. La Vérité, p. 11. The date of the letter in question
is mistakenly given as 15 September 1677 in this passage of the introduction.
28
Dulong, p. 272.
MARIE MANCINI WRITING FOR HER LIFE 13
These are her own memoirs, and the portrait that I paint of her life is so distinctive that
Your Most Serene Highness will clearly see that I have drawn it from the original. I can
even say, without claiming too much skill as a painter, that I render her down to her very
words; for truly, these are not just her actions and sentiments, but her very thoughts and
expressions, as Your Most Serene Highness will clearly recognise. One sees a certain
natural and sincere character in everything she says; something that conveys so
clearly her noble soul and her rank in society that she alone can express herself in
this way.
29
Brémond remarks in the dedication, ‘I did not consult this illustrious person on
this intention.’
30
He is referring specifically to the intention of dedicating the
work to the Duke of Brunswick, but given Marie’s silence on the matter in her cor-
respondence, it is logical to surmise that Brémond did not consult her on any of it –
neither on the dedication nor on the project of rewriting her entire memoir and
affixing his own name to it.
31
It is comical to see his emphatic praise of Marie’s
29
My translation and my emphasis. All translations of Brémond’s version, as it appears in the Doscot edition
of Mémoires d’Hortense et de Marie Mancini, are mine.
Ce sont ses propres Mémoires, et le portrait que je fais de sa vie est si particulier que Votre Altesse
Sérénissime verra bien que c’est d’après l’original que je l’ai tiré. Je puis dire même, sans faire trop
l’habile peintre, que je lui rends jusqu’à la parole; car il est vrai que ce ne sont pas seulement ses
actions et ses sentiments, mais jusqu’à ses pensées et ses expressions, comme Votre Altesse Sérénissime
le reconnaîtra fort bien. On voit un certain caractère naturel et sincère en tout ce qu’elle dit; quelque
chose qui sent si fort la noblesse de son âme et le rang qu’elle tient dans le monde, qu’il n’yaqu’elle qui
peut s’exprimer de cette manière. Mémoires d’Hortense et de Marie Mancini, p. 94.
30
‘Je n’ai point consulté cette illustre personne sur ce dessein.’Mémoires d’Hortense et de Marie Mancini,
p. 93.
31
How Brémond might have come to undertake this project is a matter of speculation. In the introduction to
their edition of La Vérité dans son jour, Cholakian and Goldsmith discuss early modern conventions related
to women’s writing, including the salon view of authorship as a collaborative enterprise, and the frequent
practice of revision and ‘correction’of women’s texts by male writers. La Vérité, pp. 15–18. Indeed, it is
probably the consensus view among scholars that Hortense Mancini’s memoir was written by her and
the writer and historian César Vichard, abbé de Saint-Réal, in concert. Additionally, early modern
nobles, whether women or men, commonly considered it to be below their station to concern themselves
with the mechanics of writing –spelling and grammar –and employed secretaries to manage such
mundane details. Marie’s secretary, whom she brought with her from the French court to Italy and who
stayed with her through the early years of her marriage, was Antoine Baudeau, sieur de Somaize, the
author of the Grand dictionnaire des prétieuses. Claude Dulong speculates that Somaize would ‘necessarily’
have known Brémond, and that it might well have been Somaize who passed the work of his former ben-
efactress to Brémond for revision. Dulong reads the Brémond edition as a contribution to Marie’s cause,
with its dedication to her old friend the Duke of Brunswick and its series of liminary sonnets in praise of
Marie. Dulong, pp. 106–08, 272–73. Cholakian and Goldsmith do not contemplate a Somaize connection,
but they observe that in 1677 when the French and Spanish versions of La Vérité dans son jour appeared,
both Brémond and Hortense Mancini were at the the court of Charles II in London. They assume that the
book may have circulated at the English court and that Brémond could have undertaken to revise it, either
invited by Hortense to ‘correct’her sister’s writings or on his own initiative. Brémond must have had access
to both the French and Spanish versions of La Vérité dans son jour, since Cholakian and Goldsmith assert
that some of the changes introduced in the Spanish version are retained in Brémond’sApologie. They
explain further that Brémond moved from England to the Netherlands, where he published Apologie in
1678, but that he must have left an earlier draft of the work in London with his friend the printer
Richard Bentley; Bentley published an English translation entitled The Apology: or, The Genuine Memoires
of Madam Maria Manchini, Constabless of Colonna, eldest Sister to the Duchess of Mazarin in 1679, which
followed Brémond’s French text but differed from it at points. La Vérité, pp. 11–12, 18.
14 SARAH NELSON
style –or rather, of his own perfect rendering of her style –and then to observe his
thoroughgoing revision of Marie’s text, which utterly deadens it through his substi-
tution of commonplaces for her more direct and precise terms, and his puffing up of
her laconic expression. He claims to quote Marie directly in the dedication itself,
saying that he needs her assistance to properly praise the duke; but compare, if
you will, what he gives as Marie’s words, enclosing them in quotation marks, to
what she actually writes in La Vérité dans son jour:
Brémond: ‘Je ne parlerai point, dit-elle, de sa générosité, de sa valeur, de sa courtoisie, de sa mag-
nificence, ni de mille manières nobles et engageantes qu’il a et qui sont si dignes d’un tel Prince: ce
sont des qualités aussi connues que son nom.’
32
Marie: Je ne parle point de la complaisance, de la générosité, ni des libéralités de ce prince, ce sont
des qualités qui sont aussi connues partout que son nom.
33
From 1677 until 1998, the French text of Marie’s memoir that was repeatedly
republished was Brémond’s version. Today there are two copies of the 1677
edition of La Vérité dans son jour in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and
one copy in the National Library of Spain,
34
whereas the text of Apologie, while
still not abundant, exists in far more copies and editions than La Vérité dans son
jour. In the National Library of the Netherlands and perhaps elsewhere, there is
a volume in which a 1677 edition of the spurious memoir that so rankled Marie
was bound together with Brémond’s 1678 rewriting of her text, but her authentic
memoir had already been dropped, and her voice, effectively silenced.
35
Over the
centuries since then, Brémond’s version of Marie’s memoir has been repeatedly
republished, sometimes with completely erroneous attributions to Sébastien Bré-
mond’s contemporary Gabriel de Brémond or to Saint-Réal, but never until 1998
was Marie’s own authentic text made available to readers again. Even the unques-
tionably apocryphal Mémoires de M.L.P.M.M. Colonne, G. Connétable du
Royaume de Naples saw a 1997 edition by Le Comptoir, with the editor Maurice
Lever declaring in the introduction that he prefers this ‘version’of Marie’s
memoir to the other one, by which he means Brémond’s.
36
His reason for preferring
it is that it is ‘unauthorised’and so must be more true, despite its ‘minor inaccura-
cies.’Lever criticises the ‘hagiographic’intent of the author of Apologie, which he
says is clear from that title alone. He has just stated that the title Apologie belongs
to the ‘entirely reworked’version by Brémond and not to Marie’s version. However,
he proceeds to discuss only Brémond’s text as if Marie’s did not exist, to snub it as
an apology, and then to praise the text he has instead chosen to republish as utterly
free of bias or hidden agenda. Lever’s thinking on the authorship and authorial
stances of the various texts is utterly muddled. He notes the distinction between
Apologie and La Vérité dans son jour, but clearly did not read the latter nor
32
Mémoires d’Hortense et de Marie Mancini, p. 94.
33
La Vérité, p. 52.
34
Two copies at the Bibliothèque nationale de France: call numbers 8-LN27-4628 and RES 8-LN27-4628;
one copy at the National Library of Spain: call number 3/42198.
35
Call number GKW 224 E 40.
36
Maurice Lever, Introduction to Cendre et poussière. Mémoires (Paris: Le Comptoir, 1997), pp. 28–31.
MARIE MANCINI WRITING FOR HER LIFE 15
investigate the differences, but simply chose to ignore the original version. He
smirkingly expresses doubt that Marie actually authored her book and avers that
there is no material evidence to prove that she did. He pays lip service to the
notion that the text he republishes is apocryphal, but in his annotation, he refers
to the authorial entity as ‘the princess.’
37
And finally, he wilfully ignores the
obvious possibility that the apocryphal memoir might be just as agenda-driven as
the one entitled Apologie.
Whetherthroughbad faith, unconsciousbias,orsimplelaziness,editorsandscholars
through the ages and right down to today
38
have taken others’word over Marie’sasto
the facts of her life. And when they accept the text entitled Apologie over the one called
La Vérité dans son jour, they take on board the fundamental difference in authorial
stance suggested by the titles. Whereas Marie staked her claim on the truth in its own
light, her male rewriter and all those who have preferred to believe him have bent her
text into a defensive posture. Who can say who ultimately prevailed, either in narrative
orinlife?Scholarsandgeneralreaderscontinuetopick up Brémond’stextand thinkof it
as Marie’s, but they can once again return to her own version now if they choose. Simi-
larly, in life, Marie never attained the degree of self-determination she sought, but she
did succeed in freeing herself from the imprisonment in which Lorenzo tried to have
her kept in the 1680s, first in a Spanish castle and then by forcing her to enter as a
novice intoa convent. Moreover, she outlived her husband by twenty-six years. After
Lorenzo’s death in 1689, she was able to fully occupy her parental role in her sons’
lives and travel between Spain and Italy at will. Marie wrote in pursuit of an ideal life
that remained beyond her grasp, but ultimately, she also wrote for her life.
Biographical note
Sarah Nelson is Associate Professor of French at the University of Idaho. She is the
translator and editor of Hortense Mancini and Marie Mancini, Memoirs, The
Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008).
Correspondence to: Sarah Nelson, Modern Languages and Cultures, University of
Idaho, 875 Perimeter Drive MS 3174, Moscow, ID 83844-3174, USA. Email:
snelson@uidaho.edu
ORCID
Sarah Nelson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8241-8886
37
Cendre et poussière, p. 43, n. 1.
38
Although the modern edition of La Vérité dans son jour has been in circulation for twenty years, albeit in a
limited number of copies, and despite a growing body of scholarship that takes it into account, studies con-
tinue to appear which ignore it. See, for example: A. Cron, Mémoires féminins de la fin du 17e siècle à la
période révolutionnaire. Enquête sur la constitution d’un genre et d’une identité (Paris: Presses Sorbonne
nouvelle, 2016); M. Tsimbidy, La Mémoire des lettres. La lettre dans les Mémoires du XVIIe siècle
(Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013); K. Beckmann, ‘Inszenierter Skandal als Apologie? Die Memoiren der
Hortense und Marie Mancini’(Doctoral Diss., Universität Trier, 2004).
16 SARAH NELSON