Read The Kings' Mistresses for Free Online

and yet you weep?” She later wrote, “They put on wonderful operas in Venice, among them the Titus, to which I went often. I was no less attracted by the sweetness of the voices and by the acting of the players—particularly that of a musician of His Royal Highness called Cavagnino, and of one of my maids who performed admirably—than by the beauty of the work, which earned the applause of everyone and which was assuredly among the most beautiful that have ever been seen.” 11
    It was not difficult, for either Marie or her husband, to see themselves in the grand characters from history and legend who were familiar to the baroque stage. The theaters of Italy and France in the seventeenth century did not produce plays about the real world around them. Instead, spectators were treated to dramatic enactments of familiar stories from myth and history that sought to strike their audiences with wonder, admiration, sadness, and joy. In Marie’s day the staging of an opera often would include marvelous and complex machines to enable actors to fly across the stage or rise to the rafters, special effects to simulate cataclysmic events such as earthquake or fire, and elaborate sets evoking exotic and imaginary locales.
    In Rome as in Venice, the carnival season gave rise to numerous masquerades and public parades, with noble families competing to
produce the most luxurious and imaginative float, and with members of these families participating in costume. After 1667, when the new pope lifted restrictions on carnival masquerade, Marie and Lorenzo stopped spending their winters in Venice and instead focused on the cultural entertainments being generated in Rome. When Rome seemed to offer little of interest to travelers from France seeking the sort of artistic and social entertainments they could find in Paris, the Colonna couple hosted balls, gambling parties, concerts, and generally open-ended visiting hours. “Without this house foreigners and especially Frenchmen would have difficulty passing the time,” wrote one traveler. One could enter and exit “when one wants; there one dances, gambles, has conversation and passes the evening very nicely.” 12
    In 1664 the Colonnas began renovating their palace to install a theater. The work continued even during their long absences in Venice, and productions started in 1666. By 1668 the theater was staging large-scale affairs with more than thirty actors and dancers. The Colonnas employed their own impresario, the playwright and director Filippo Accaioli, who also tutored their sons. Beginning in 1668, the dramatic productions alternated with parades during carnival. The floats Marie designed created a huge sensation. In 1665, after the birth of their second child, Lorenzo had designed a float on which he and Marie’s brother had stood dressed as the twin celestial gods Castor and Pollux. The float in which Marie was featured for the 1668 carnival took the planetary metaphor to a more elaborate level. Constructed in the shape of a giant cloud rising some thirty feet into the air, drawn by four horses and escorted by a dozen more, along with numerous foot soldiers bedecked with feathers and Roman armor, the float was topped by a man dressed as Saturn, and below him appeared the figures of Mars and Jupiter. In the central position was Apollo as the sun, and to his left just below him were Venus, Diana, and Juno. Marie was Venus and her
close friend and lady-in-waiting, Countess Ortensia Stella, was Diana. Spectators could not have failed to recall that the sun-god figure was the favorite emblem and masquerade of Louis XIV, and they certainly were astonished by the daring of these noblewomen, whose participation in the Roman carnival parade was “a completely new thing, never seen before.” 13 For a woman to appear masked in public was a violation of a long-standing ban in the holy city. Marie’s planetary carnival machine engaged more than one