True Pleasures by Lucinda Holdforth Read Free Book Online Page A

– Parisians called them
Les Mazarinettes
– each of them brought over from Italy as children. Courtesan Ninon de Lanclos wrote to St Evremond that she thought charm ran through their blood. But even among this bevy of beauties, Hortense was special. Not only was she the most beautiful of the Cardinal’s nieces, she was one of the most perfect beauties of Louis XIV’s young court. She had pale olive skin, large blue-grey eyes, soft black curls and a statuesque figure. One contemporary admirer said she wasn’t like one of those insipid French dolls, but more of a ‘lofty Roman Beauty’. Even when she was getting older, Hortense retained her powerful appeal: at the age of thirty-nine, men were still fighting duels over her. As Madame de Sévigné exclaimed,
Who would have believed that the eyes of a grandmother could work such havoc?
    Hortense’s beauty alone doesn’t explain why she fascinated so many people. She was famous because she broke the rules. People in court circles felt that vicarious shiver of excitement as they followed the next instalment of the Hortense Mancini story: what would she do next? It wasn’t that Hortense set out to destroy society or undermine its values. She wasn’t a romantic rebel or social revolutionary; far from it. She simply wanted to redefine her own place within society, to re-establish the social order under different circumstances. But that alone, of course, was daring enough.
    When her protector, the Duke of Savoy, died in 1675 and Hortense was forced to seek shelter in England, shecouldn’t travel from northern Italy across France because her obsessive husband still had spies looking out for her. Hortense had to ride across French enemy territory in Switzerland, Alsace and Germany to Amsterdam to embark on the boat for England. She dressed as a man in the wig, plumed hat and silk culottes of a cavalier. She had abandoned her past and faced an uncertain future, but you wouldn’t have guessed it. On the way she bumped into a girlfriend who, far from delighting in her friend’s good spirits, was outraged that Hortense refused to be humbled by life’s disasters.
What is most strange
, railed Sidonie de Courcelles,
is that this woman triumphs over all her misfortunes by an excess of folly which has no parallel and that after receiving this setback she thinks only of enjoying herself. When passing through here she was on horseback, befeathered and bewigged, escorted by twenty men. She talked of nothing but violins and of hunting parties and everything else that gives pleasure
.
    This story, of course, made the rounds of the Paris salons. Depending on their temperament, Parisians were either captivated or appalled by a woman who seemed so happy in the midst of her life’s shambles.
    While Hortense was King Charles II’s mistress, one of his daughters, by his long-standing mistress Barbara Cleveland, fell passionately in love with her. Instead of carefully discouraging this inappropriate relationship, Hortense ignored the King’s explicit instructions and therefore her own clear social and financial interests. She and the Countess of Sussex struck up a scandalous friendship: they even took up fencing together, according to one outraged observer, dashing boisterously into St James Park for early-morning jousts with drawn swords beneath their nightgowns. It was typical of Hortense to follow her instincts rather than her interests. As a result, the Kingdowngraded his relationship with her immediately. Hortense became less important to ambassadors; her income less secure; her social status only guaranteed by her own charms, not her royal associations. Yet in London her salon continued to shine.
    For Hortense, life was irrepressibly about
everything that gives pleasure
. The puritans and the naysayers couldn’t bear it that Hortense broke the rules and got away with it. They used words like
folly
and
dissoluteness
about