The Loves of Charles II (141 page)

She remembered that Louis—impressionable and idealistic—had fallen in love first with Olympia and then more passionately, more seriously with Marie. She remembered Marie’s unhappiness, the tears, the heartbreak. She remembered Louis, so young, so determined to have his own way and marry Marie. Poor Louis! And poor Marie!

It was the Cardinal who had ruined their hopes. Some men would have rejoiced to see a niece the Queen of France. Not Mazarin. He feared the French. They hated him and blamed him for all their misfortunes; he believed that if he allowed their King to marry his niece they would have risen against him, and there would have been revolution in France. He remembered the civil war of the Fronde. Perhaps he had been wise. But what misery the young people had suffered. Louis had married the plain little Infanta of Spain, Marie Thérèse, whom he would never love, and now his love affairs were the talk of the world. And poor Marie! She had been hastily married to Lorenzo Colonna who was the Grand Constable of Naples; and he had succeeded in making her as unhappy as she had made him and as, doubtless, Marie Thérèse, the meek and prim little Spaniard, had made Louis.

And Charles, seeing the young Hortense, and connoisseur of beauty that he was even in those days, had declared that he would be happy to make her his wife. He had urgent need of the money which would have helped him to regain his throne, and it was known that the Cardinal’s wealth would go to his nieces. To the penurious exile the exquisite and wealthy child had seemed an ideal match.

But the Cardinal had frowned on Charles’ offer. He saw the young man as a reckless profligate who would never regain his throne, and he did not wish his niece to link her fortunes with such a man.

So the Cardinal had prevented his two nieces from becoming queens. He had torn them from two charming people that they might make marriages with unhappy results to all concerned.

“Those days are long ago,” said Charles. “’Tis a sad habit to brood on what might have been. ’Tis a happier one to let the present make up for the disappointments of the past.”

“Which we should do?”

“Which we
shall
do,” said Charles vehemently.

“It is good of you to offer me refuge here,” said Hortense.

“Good! Nay, ’tis what all the world would expect of me.”

Hortense laughed that low and musical laugh of hers. “And of me,” she said.

“Od’s Fish! I wonder you did not come before.”

Hortense’s dreamy eyes looked back once more into the past. César Vicard had been an exciting lover. It had not been her wish to leave him. There had been others equally exciting, equally enthralling, and she would have been too indolent to leave any of them had circumstances not made it necessary for her to do so.

Yet she had left her husband and four children. So in a dire emergency she could rouse herself.

“It is an adventure,” she said, “to come to a new country.”

“And to an old friend?” he asked passionately.

“It was so long ago. So much has happened. You may have heard of the life I led with Armand.”

“Vague rumors reached me.”

“You wonder why my uncle arranged that marriage,” she said. “I might have had Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy. He would have made a better husband. At least he was called Charles. Then there was Pedro of Portugal, and the Maréchal Turenne.”

“The last would have been a little aged for you, I imagine.”

“Thirty-five years older. But life with him could not have been worse than it was with Armand. Even the Prince de Cortenay who, I knew, concerned himself with my uncle’s money rather than with myself …”

“The graceless fool!” said Charles softly.

“He could not have made my life more intolerable than did Armand.”

“Your uncle delayed marrying you so often that when he was on his deathbed he acted without due thought in that important matter.”

“To my cost.”

“It was so unsatisfactory?”

“I was fifteen, he was thirty. Some I could have understood. Some I could have excused. A libertine … yes; I have never pretended to be a saint.
He had a fine title: Armand de la Porte Marquis de Meilleraye and Grand Master of the Artillery of France. Would you have expected such a one to be a bigot … a madman? But he was. We had not been married many months when he became obsessed with the idea that everyone about him was impure, and that it was his duty to purify them. He sought to purify statues, pictures …”

“Sacrilege!” said Charles.

“And myself.”

“Greater sacrilege!” murmured Charles.

Hortense laughed lightly. “Do you blame me for leaving him? How could I stay? I endured that life for seven wretched years. I saw my fortune being dissipated—and not in the way one would expect a husband to dissipate his wife’s fortune. He agreed to take my uncle’s name. Uncle thought he would be amenable. We became the Duc and Duchesse Mazarin. Uncle would not allow him to use the ‘de.’ He said: ‘Not Hortense, my fortune, and
de
Mazarin. That is too much. Hortense, yes. A fortune, yes. But you call yourself plain Duc Mazarin.’”

Charles laughed. “That is characteristic of the old man.”

“And so to me came the Palais Mazarin. You remember it—in the Rue de Richelieu—and with it came the Hôtel Tuboeuf and the picture and sculpture galleries, those which had been built by Mazard, as well as the property in the Rue des Petits Champs.”

“Such treasures! They must have been as good as anything Louis had in the Louvre.”

“Indeed yes. Pictures by the greatest artists. Statues, priceless books, furniture … It all came to me.”

“And he—your husband—sold it and so frittered away your inheritance?”

“He sold some. He thought it was wrong for a woman to adorn herself with jewels. He was verging on madness from the very beginning. I remember how I first came upon him before a great masterpiece, a brush in his hand. I said to him: ‘Armand, what are you doing? Are you imagining that you are a great painter?’ And he stood up, pointing the brush at the painting, his eyes blazing with what I can only believe was madness. He said: ‘These pictures are indecent. No one should look on such nakedness. All the servants here will be corrupted.’ And I looked closer and saw that he had been painting over the nudes. There were his crude additions, ruining masterpieces. That was not all. He took a hammer and smashed many of the statues. I dare not think how much he has wantonly destroyed.”

“And you lived with that man for seven years!”

“Seven years! I thought it my duty to do so. Oh, he was a madman. He
forbade the maidservants to milk the cows, for he said this might put indecent thoughts into their heads. He wanted to extract our daughter’s front teeth because they were well-formed and he feared they might give rise to vanity. He wrote to Louis, telling him that he had had instructions from the Angel Gabriel to warn the King that disaster would overtake him if he did not immediately give up Louise de la Vallière. You see he was mad—quite mad. But I was glad later that he had written to Louis thus, for when I ran away from him he asked Louis to insist on my returning to him, and Louis’ answer was that he was sure Armand’s good friend the Angel Gabriel, with whom he seemed to be on such excellent terms, could help him more in this matter than could the King of France.”

Charles laughed. “Ah, you did well to leave such a madman. The only complaint I would make is that you waited so long before coming to England.”

“Oh, I was in and out of convents. And believe me, Charles, in some of these convents the life is rigorous indeed. I would as lief be a prisoner in the Bastille as in some of them. I was in the Convent of the Daughters of Mary, in Paris, and I was right glad to leave it.”

“You were meant to grace a Court, never a convent,” said Charles.

She sighed. “I feel as though I may have come home. This is a country strange to me, but I have good friends here. My little cousin, Mary Beatrice, the wife of your own brother, is here. How I long to see her! And there is you, my dear Charles, the friend of my childhood. How fares Mary Beatrice?”

“She grows reconciled to her aged husband. I have become her friend. That was inevitable because, from the first, she reminded me of you.”

She smiled lazily. “Then of course there is my old friend, St. Evremond. He has long been urging me to come to England.”

“Good St. Evremond! I always liked the fellow. He has settled happily here; I like his wit.”

“So you have made him Master of your ducks, I hear.”

“A task well suited to his talents,” said Charles, “for there is nothing he need do but watch the creatures and now and then throw them something to eat; but to perform this task he must saunter in the Park and converse while he stands beside the lake. It is a pleasure to saunter and converse with him.”

“I wonder does he grow homesick for France? Does he wish he had not been so indiscreet as to criticize my uncle at the time of the Treaty of the Pyrenees?”

“Does he tell you?”

“He tells me that he would never wish to leave England if I were there.”

“So he has helped to bring you. I must reward my keeper of the ducks.”

“He but spoke like a courtier, I doubt not.”

“All men would speak like courtiers to you, Hortense.”

“As they do to all women.”

“With you they would mean the fulsome things they say.”

She laughed. “I will call my blackamoor to make coffee for Your Majesty. You will never have tasted coffee such as he can brew.”

“And while we talk, we will arrange for you to move to Whitehall.”

“Nay, I would not do so. I would prefer a house … nearby. I do not think Her Grace of Portsmouth would wish me to have my quarters in Whitehall Palace.”

“It is spacious. I have made improvements, and it is not the rambling mass of buildings it was when’ I came back to England.”

“Nevertheless, I would prefer to be nearby, you understand, but not too near.”

Charles was thinking quickly. He was determined to lose no time in making this exciting addition to his seraglio.

With amusement he accepted coffee from Hortense’s little slave, and as he sipped it he said: “Lord Windsor, who is Master of Horse to the Duchess of York, would most gladly vacate his house for you. It faces St. James’ Park and would suit you very happily, I doubt not.”

“It seems as though Your Majesty is ready to make me very happy in England.”

“I shall set about that task with all my heart and soul,” said Charles, taking her hand and kissing it.

It was some months before Hortense moved to Whitehall. The question of money was a delicate one. Charles had placed himself in Danby’s hands, for Danby had proved his worth in matters of finance.

Danby had summed up the character of the beautiful Hortense: Sensual, but by no means vicious; cultured, but by no means shrewd. She would let great opportunities elude her, not because she did not see them, but because she was too indolent to seize them.

He did not believe that she would long hold the King’s undivided attention. She was more beautiful than any of the King’s ladies, it was true, but Charles nowadays wanted more than beauty. Hortense desired a large pension because she needed it to live in the state to which she was accustomed. She had no wish to store up for herself great wealth as Louise did. She would not ask for honors, titles; she did not wish to reign as a queen in the Court. She wanted to be lazily content with good food, good wine, a lover capable of satisfying her. She would never intrigue.

Danby had decided that he would be well advised to support Louise. Therefore he held the King back from supplying the large income which Hortense demanded.

Hortense was, he knew, hoping that her husband would give her a bigger allowance than the four hundred pounds a year which was all he would allow her out of the vast fortune she had brought him. Danby believed that if Hortense received what she wanted she would accept Charles as a lover whether he supplied the income or not. That was Hortense’s nature. She now asked £4,000 a year from Charles. But, as Danby pointed out, that would not be all she would ask.

Hortense was extravagant by nature. She had told Charles of how, one day shortly before her uncle’s death, she had thrown three hundred pistoles out of the window of the Palais Mazarin because she liked to see the servants scramble for them and fight each other.

“Uncle was such a careful man,” Hortense had said. “Some say my action shortened his life. But it did not prevent his leaving me his fortune.”

Oh yes, Danby pointed out, if the King wished to keep his exchequer in order, they must be careful of such a woman.

But the whole country was talking of the King’s latest mistress. Sir Carr Scrope wrote in the prologue to Etherege’s
Man of Mode
which was produced in the King’s Theater that year:

And the audience roared its approval of the lines, although most people declared that anything was worthwhile if it put Madam Carwell’s nose out of joint.

But Charles was impatient. He insisted on the pension’s being paid, and as there was no hope of Hortense’s being able to persuade Louis to force her husband to increase her allowance, she accepted Charles’ offer and became his mistress.