The Kings' Mistresses by Elizabeth Goldsmith Page B

choice to abandon her husband’s household, Constabless Colonna had forfeited all claim to the treasured possessions she had acquired during her marriage, a legal restriction that her sons had continued to observe even after their father’s death.

    In fact, most of the items in the inventory Father Delmas prepared were designated as legally owned not by Marie Colonna but by her sons, to whom they were to be returned after her death. Among the objects held in her own name were only two of any exceptional value, but they were stunning. It was striking, too, that she had carried these items with her even on what was essentially a personal business trip to take counsel from Father Ascanio. Though the two items were small, Father Delmas, who knew the stories behind them, must have been struck by their beauty and by the incongruous decision that had been made to bring them on this particular voyage. The first was a pair of diamond-encrusted brooches, exquisitely designed, which had been offered to Marie as a wedding gift from her husband, Lorenzo. And the second was a magnificent strand of royal jewels, thirty-five large pearls that had been given to Marie in 1659, one year before her marriage, by Louis XIV.
    â€œI do not know that I have any debts,” Marie had written in her will, “but if I do they must be paid forthwith by my heirs.” What pride and what struggle she had felt and undergone in the fifty-five years since these two prize jewels had come into her possession, and how determined she had been to keep them in her possession through her life of wealth and poverty, independence, despair, and exhilaration. In her memoirs she had described these objects as pieces of her identity, the only jewels she had taken with her on that warm day in 1672 when she fled her husband, never to return. “And so I set out on the twenty-ninth of May, carrying no more on my person than seven hundred pistoles, my pearls, and some diamond pendants.” In her travels the jewels only made her more vulnerable to the constant risk of robbery or capture, but she had always seemed to view them as a charm, somehow protecting her from danger. Father Delmas, studying them, would have appreciated the strength and beauty of this strand of gems that had survived such an adventurous and volatile life’s itinerary. The pearls were legendary, like their owner and like the king who had given them.

    The pearls had stayed with Marie throughout her years in Rome as wife to the Grand Constable Colonna. She had worn them as she sat for portraits done by the celebrated artists who found patronage from the Colonna family: Pierre Mignard, Jacob-Ferdinand Voet, Carlo Maratta, Gaspard Dughet. She had taken them with her when she and her sister Hortense became fugitives, causing her servants much anxiety but somehow having a magical and quieting effect on the two ladies, who had amazed their small entourage by calmly going into the woods and falling asleep as they waited for the boatman who had promised to take them to France.
    Even during her most difficult years in Madrid in the 1680s, when Marie was desperate to find allies against her husband’s efforts to have her imprisoned, she had kept Louis’s gift close to her and even worn her pearls in the most incongruous of circumstances. When Father Delmas recorded the pearls in his inventory of Marie’s possessions at death, he knew her intentions for them. She had made it clear in her will. They were never to be sold, and must remain in her family for all time. 14
    A few months after Marie’s final conversation with Father Ascanio, on September 1, 1715, Louis XIV died of a gangrenous infection, bringing to an end his fifty-five-year reign, at the time the longest in European history.
    Even in death, Marie wanted to leave a trace of a life committed to mobility and independence. She left instructions that she be buried wherever she was when she died. Her youngest son,