Cardinal Mazarin.--Regency of Anne of Austria.--Her Perseverance in
Retaining Her Minister.--Mazarin Gives His Nieces in Marriage.--M. de la
Meilleraye.--The Cardinal's Festivities.--Madame de Montespan's Luck at a
Lottery.
Before taking holy orders, Cardinal Mazarin had served as an officer in
the Spanish army, where he had even won distinction.
Coming to France in the train of a Roman cardinal, he took service with
Richelieu, who, remarking in him all the qualities of a supple,
insinuating, artificial nature,--that is to say, the nature of a good
politician,--appointed him his private secretary, and entrusted him with
all his secrets, as if he had singled him out as his successor.
Upon the death of Richelieu, Mazarin did not scruple to avow that the
great Armand's sceptre had been a tyrant's sceptre and of bronze. By
such an admission he crept into the good graces of Louis XIII., who,
himself almost moribund, had shown how pleased he was to see his chief
minister go before him to the grave.
Louis XIII. being dead, his widow, Anne of Austria, in open Parliament
cancelled the monarch's testamentary depositions and constituted herself
Regent with absolute authority. Mazarin was her Richelieu.
In France, where men affect to be so gallant and so courteous, how is it
that when women rule their reign is always stormy and troublous? Anne of
Austria--comely, amiable, and gracious as she was--met with the same
brutal discourtesy which her sister-in-law, Marie de Medici, had been
obliged to bear. But gifted with greater force of intellect than that
queen, she never yielded aught of her just rights; and it was her strong
will which more than once astounded her enemies and saved the crown for
the young King.
They lampooned her, hissed her, and burlesqued her publicly at the
theatres, cruelly defaming her intentions and her private life. Strong
in the knowledge of her own rectitude, she faced the tempest without
flinching; yet inwardly her soul was torn to pieces. The barricading of
Paris, the insolence of M. le Prince, the bravado and treachery of
Cardinal de Retz, burnt up the very blood in her veins, and brought on
her fatal malady, which took the form of a hideous cancer.
Our nobility (who are only too glad to go and reign in Naples, Portugal,
or Poland) openly declared that no foreigner ought to hold the post of
minister in Paris. Despite his Roman purple, Mazarin was condemned to be
hanged.
The motive for this was some trifling tax which he had ordered to be
collected before this had been ratified by the magistrates and registered
in the usual way.
But the Queen knew how to win over the nobles. Her cardinal was
recalled, and the apathy of the Parisians put an end to these
dissensions, from which, one must admit, the people and the bourgeoisie
got all the ills and the nobility all the profits.
As comptroller of the list of benefices, M. le Cardinal allotted the
wealthiest abbeys of the realm to himself.
Having made himself an absolute master of finance, like M. Fouquet, he
amassed great wealth. He built a magnificent palace in Rome, and an
equally brilliant one in Paris, conferring upon himself the wealthy
governorships of various towns or provinces. He had a guard of honour
attached to his person, and a captain of the guard in attendance, just as
Richelieu had.
He married one of his nieces to the Prince of Mantua, another to the
Prince de Conti, a third to the Comte de Soissons, a fourth to the
Constable Colonna (an Italian prince), a fifth to the Duc de Mercoeur (a
blood relation of Henri IV.), and a sixth to the Duc de Bouillon. As to
Hortense, the youngest, loveliest of them all,--Hortense, the
beauteous-eyed, his charming favourite,--he appointed her his sole
heiress, and having given her jewelry and innumerable other presents, he
married her to the agreeable Duc de la Meilleraye, son of the marshal of
that name.
Society was much astonished when it came out that M. le Cardinal had
disinherited his own nephew, a man of merit, handing over his name, his
fortune, and his arms to a stranger. This was an error; in taking the
name and arms of Mazarin, young De la Meilleraye was giving up those
which he ought to have given up, and assuming those which it behove him
to assume.
[De Mancini, Duc de Nevers, a relative of the last Duc de Nivernois. He
married, soon after, Madame de Montespan's niece.--Editor's Note]
Nor did he retain the great possessions of the La Meilleraye family.
Herein, certainly, he did not consult his devotion; since the secret and
fatherly avowal of M. le Cardinal he had no right whatever to the estates
of this family.
Beneath the waving folds of his large scarlet robe, the Cardinal showed
such ease and certainty of address, that he never put one in mind of a
cardinal and a bishop. To such manners, however, one was accustomed; in
a leading statesman they were not unpleasant.
He often gave magnificent balls, at which he displayed all the
accomplishments of his nieces and the sumptuous splendour of his
furniture. At such entertainments, always followed by a grand banquet,
he was wont to show a liberality worthy of crowned heads. One day, after
the feast, he announced that a lottery would be held in his palace.
Accordingly, all the guests repaired to his superb gallery, which had
just been brilliantly decorated with paintings by Romanelli, and here,
spread out upon countless tables, we saw pieces of rare porcelain,
scent-bottles of foreign make, watches of every size and shape, chains of
pearls or of coral, diamond buckles and rings, gold boxes adorned by
portraits set in pearls or in emeralds, fans of matchless elegance,--in a
word, all the rarest and most costly things that luxury and fashion could
invent.
The Queens distributed the tickets with every appearance of honesty and
good faith. But I had reason to remark, by what happened to myself, that
the tickets had been registered beforehand. The young Queen, who felt
her garter slipping off, came to me in order to tighten it. She handed
me her ticket to hold for a moment, and when she had fastened her garter,
I gave her back my ticket instead of her own. When the Cardinal from his
dais read out the numbers in succession, my number won a portrait of the
King set in brilliants, much to the surprise of the Queen-mother and his
Eminence; they could not get over it.
To me this lottery of the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Changes
[The gallery to which the Marquise alludes is to-day called the
Manuscript Gallery. It belongs to the Royal Library in the Rue de
Richelieu. Mazarin's house is now the Treasury.]
I brought good luck, and we often talked about it afterwards with the
King, regarding it as a sort of prediction or horoscope.