The Kings' Mistresses Read Online Free

where women were far better off than in most parts of the world. “There are even some places,” he wrote, “where women are treated like slaves. In China their feet are bound during childhood to stop them leaving the house, where they see virtually only their husbands and their children. They are also shut in in Turkey. They are not much better off in Italy.” 2
    In August 1660 one of Lorenzo Colonna’s emissaries in Paris wrote to him that Marie was finally getting over the idea that “women are like slaves” in Rome. When she finally left for Italy, her voyage was made more difficult by an illness she contracted en
route, and by her new husband’s impatience to consummate the marriage immediately after meeting her for the first time at their rendezvous point in Turin, without regard for her physical and emotional exhaustion. She arrived in Rome seriously ill but managed to survive the elaborate formal presentations arranged for her there. For the rest of her life she frequently would associate Rome with illness, complaining of the bad air and poor sanitation compared with Paris.
    Rome in 1661 was a city in the throes of architectural and urban development. As Marie traversed the city from the north, she reflected on how much it had changed since her departure just seven years earlier. The new pope, Fabio Chigi, who had assumed the name Alexander VII, had ambitious plans to redesign the city, build new churches, and impose a more modern urban landscape onto a city whose people had suffered from malaria and economic decline since the beginning of the century. In 1656, with a new outbreak of bubonic plague in Rome, the pope had instituted sanitation measures to contain the spread of the disease. Almost as soon as Alexander’s pontificate began, it was clear that he intended to spend a considerable portion of the Catholic Church’s resources on roads, waterworks, buildings, and architectural projects. He was helped in the latter two goals by the incomparable genius of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose many commissions of monuments, fountains, churches, and sculpture would continue to transform the city until the latter’s death in 1680.
    Marie had married into a family whose noble credentials extended back before the year 1000. The family even claimed ancestry dating to the era of Julius Caesar. Their prominence was anchored, as was that of all Roman nobility, in military exploits and in the Church—five popes had been Colonnas. Lorenzo’s great-great-grandfather Marcantonio Colonna was the most famous Roman military hero since antiquity, having led a coalition of Christian states against the
Turks in the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, which decisively halted the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe. The city of Rome was dotted with statues and monuments commemorating this achievement, reminding anyone who walked through its streets of the debt Rome owed to the Colonna dynasty. One of them, a statue of Marcantonio Colonna in antique garb, continues to preside over the garden behind the family palazzo today. The ceiling of the Grand Gallery of the Palazzo is still covered with frescoes commemorating the great battle, and numerous giant seascape oil paintings depict the historic victory. Lorenzo Colonna’s rank as constable designated him as a military commander in the family tradition.
    On June 30, 1661, Marie, weak from her illness, was carried into her new home, where she was placed in her room on the ground floor, cooled by a small fountain and darkened to keep out the summer heat. There she prepared to meet the flood of curious visitors who would come to pay their respects to the newlyweds. If she had doubted it before, she could have no more uncertainties about the prestige of the family she had married into. Lorenzo’s uncle the Cardinal Colonna was one of the first to arrive, bearing expensive gifts of jewels and money. Marie observed this parade with her