The Kings' Mistresses by Elizabeth Goldsmith Page A

urgently asking to speak with him. The good priest was sympathetic, but he also had other obligations to attend to and his own health
was failing. He knew how demanding she could be and prepared himself to urge her to be patient. He was not ready on that day for the intense and lengthy conversations that he knew she would require. When he arrived at the Salvati residence, he later wrote in his report of the events, he
    beseeched her Excellency not to visit him as was her habit, because it was the day that the courier was scheduled to come take the mail going to Spain, and the Reverend Father would be extremely busy. I repeated several times to Madame that I would ask her to think of me as dead on that day, and having said that I returned to my lodging thinking only of the writing I needed to do, and not dreaming that Madame was to make that impossible. 12
    At noon she suddenly appeared in his doorway, saying she had been praying at the Carmelite church and wanted him to explain a passage from the gospel to her. “I satisfied this pious request,” he reported, “and then accompanied her back to the Salvati residence, again repeating that I wanted her to think of me on that day as being in the other world.” 13
    But at the end of the day she appeared once more at the door of the Santo Sepulcro priory, and this time she simply stared intently at Father Ascanio and the papers and books surrounding him, before collapsing on the floor. Doctors were called, but they could do nothing to reverse the attack of “apoplexy,” or stroke; they could only lift her onto the monk’s cot, where she died a few hours later. It was left to Ascanio to alert her household in Pisa and write a letter reporting the sad news to her two surviving sons and their families, while Marie’s personal chaplain, Father Delmas, was summoned to take the inventory of her belongings at the time of her death, beginning with the objects she had brought with her to Pisa and finishing with a list of the items in her household in Livorno.

    Anyone who didn’t know the owner of these materials would have understood, at first look, that they were the property of a noblewoman with considerable wealth. But examined more closely, the inventory of the deceased’s personal belongings had some mysterious aspects. The contents of the lady’s wardrobe were impressive—they included a vast amount of fine clothing and luxury items, and there was perhaps even more than the usual array of laces and rich fabrics: satins, velvet, Indian silks and cottons, and finely embroidered linens. Their owner had traveled and had exotic tastes. She possessed numerous Spanish mirrors, combs, and fans, which were carefully packed in a small metal chest lined with green velvet, and she had two soft velvet cushions for her little pet dogs. She had traveled from Livorno to Pisa in her personal carriage, designed in the modern style with glass windows, and upholstered in the traditional red velvet. Back in Livorno she left several other means of transportation, unusual for an elderly widow: along with horses and mules she owned a light two-wheeled carriage designed for speedy travel and a small movable seat called a flying chair, which could be rigged to whisk its rider from an upper floor down the open stairwell to make a dramatic appearance when receiving guests. She was educated: there were books, mostly translated volumes of classical Roman authors such as Juvenal and Virgil. In Livorno there were also many fabrics and tapestries but almost no works of art—no family portraits or paintings decorating the walls, a most unusual absence for a person of her standing, and especially for a noblewoman who had been famous as a great art patron. The galleries of paintings and statuary in the palazzo Colonna were the envy of the European nobility, and Marie and her husband alone had amassed more than 4,000 works of art. But as a woman who had made the radical