Memoirs, Hortense Mancini and Marie Mancini

As an introduction to this volume from the Other Voices in early modern Europe collection, Sarah Nelson reminds the reader how unusual the positions of Hortense and Marie Mancini were as autobiographers in mid-seventeenth-century France. Narrating in the first person their ‘respective struggle to win the right to live independently,’ both women acquire the reputation amongst their peers of being endowed with strong personalities, and sometimes qualified as ‘crazy’ (folles). Indeed, the sisters, living in the same situation of being unhappily married and seeking their freedom, give the readers a most unusual testimony: the account of two women describing their joys and misfortunes, acting as their own biographers during their lifetime, in an age when this was most unusual.

Hortense Mancini, known as Madame Mazarin after having inherited her uncle's fortune, began to write her Memoirs while settled in the château de Chambéry, residence of one of her former suitors, the duke of Savoy. Putting a final end to her writings in 1675, at the age of 29, little did she know at that moment that other adventures would lead her to Charles II of England's court where she would acquire as great a reputation of précieuse as the one she had acquired while at Louis XIV's court. With such a personality, the reader could fear finding only vain words relating the fast and frivolous court's life, but Hortense Mancini made a point to describe her situation as the one of a wife escaping her husband's tyranny and using her privileged position among the nobility to depict it publicly through the publication of her account.

Marie Mancini is perhaps better known to readers as Louis XIV's first love than as an independent and fierce personality. Like Hortense, she went through difficult times with her husband, the Constable Colonna. But unlike her younger sister, Marie revealed herself less concerned with conventional social manners and possessing a greater temper, which increased from her youngest years onwards, allowing her to respond to her own misfortunes with a ferocity that often resulted in her losing face in the eyes of her noble peers. Even the writing of her Memoirs resulted from her impulsive temper, hurt by the publication in 1676 of Memoirs supposedly from her hand. In 1677, at the age of 38, she would publish La Vérité dans son jour, ou les véritables mémoires de Mme Mancini, connétable Colonne, where she would indignantly stand against the previous publication, alleging its illegitimacy and claming her desire to ‘[produce] a sincere and genuine account of everything that has happened to [her] since [her] tenderest youth’. Relating the love which bound her to Louis XIV, she depicts herself as the lover sacrificed for reasons of State. At the time she writes her Memoirs, Marie Mancini has already been through deep sorrows caused by the decline of her relations with her husband the Constable; however, when mentioning the loss of the king's love, she stated that ‘nothing has hurt [her] so deeply in her life’.

In 1678, her Memoirs were published in a second French version, edited in Leiden. Nothing reveals that she personally knew either the writer Sébastien Brémond or about his edition of her annotated and corrected Memoirs, then entitled Apologie, ou les Véritables Mémoires de Mme Marie Mancini, écrits par elle-même. While Hortense's Memoirs had already been translated into English and Italian, the Brémond edition of her writings not only followed the same path, being translated into English in 1679, but also surpassed Marie Mancini's La Vérité dans son jour on becoming the only known version of her Memoirs through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries up until the publication in 1998 by Patricia Cholakian and Elizabeth Goldsmith of the version written by her.

Sarah Nelson's edition and translation under review here is, according its author, meant to ‘give the English-speaking reader the best possible idea of Marie's own voice’. As for Hortense's Memoirs, Nelson based her work on the most recent and acknowledged edition by Gérard Doscot of Madame de Mazarin's Memoirs, last published by Mercure de France in 2003.