November 14, 2022 • 46 mins
Hortense and Marie Mancini tried to make a place for themselves in 17th-century Europe, defying all kinds of conventions along the way. Their lives were full of adventure and daring, but they were also both stuck in abusive marriages.
Research:
- "Jules Mazarin." Historic World Leaders, edited by Anne Commire, Gale, 1994. Gale In Context: U.S. History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1616000407/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=68d5e2f8. Accessed 11 Oct. 2022.
- "When lesbian passions stirred at court." Times [London, England], 7 Feb. 2019, p. 3. Gale In Context: Global Issues, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A572957931/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=8ab9535e. Accessed 11 Oct. 2022.
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Mancini sisters". Encyclopedia Britannica, 11 Dec. 2015, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mancini-sisters. Accessed 12 October 2022.
- Esslemont, Chloe. “Keeping up with the Mazarinettes.” Art UK. 1/17/2019. https://artuk.org/discover/stories/keeping-up-with-the-mazarinettes
- Ferguson, Donna. “Restoration influencer: how Charles II's clever mistress set trends ahead of her time." The Guardian.2/28/2021. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/feb/28/restoration-influencer-how-charles-iis-clever-mistress-set-trends-ahead-of-her-time
- Folger Library. “The Fabulous Mancini Sisters.” 3/13/2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sX30o5FX0Y
- Folgerpedia. “The Mancini Sisters.” https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/The_Mancini_Sisters:_Mistresses_and_Memoirists
- Goldsmith, Elizabeth C. “The Kings' Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin.” Public Affairs. 2012.
- Latour, Therese Louis. “Princesses Ladies And Adventuresses of the Reign of Louis XIV.” London. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. 1924.
- O’Rourke, John. “17th-Century Sisters the Kardashians Might Admire.” BU Today. 8/27/2012. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2012/17th-century-sisters-the-kardashians-might-admire/
- Porter, Linda. “Charles II’s last mistress.” Historia: Magazine of the Historical Writers’ Association. 4/16/2020. https://www.historiamag.com/charles-iis-last-mistress/
- Richard, Kristen. “How Italy’s ‘Runaway Duchess’ Changed How We Drink Champagne.” Wine Enthusiast. 2/11/2022. https://www.winemag.com/2022/02/11/hortense-mancini-runaway-duchess-champagne/
- Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. “The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Rutland: Letters and papers, 1440-1797 (v.3 mainly correspondence of the fourth Duke of Rutland). v.4. Charters, cartularies, &c. Letters and papers, supplementary. Extracts from household accounts.” Jan. 1889. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=IgoRAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book-IgoRAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today we're
going to talk about a pair of sisters who, along
(00:21):
with their other sisters and their cousins, get a lot
of comparisons to whatever influencer slash media celebrity is making
the most headlines at any given moment. Like over the
past few years, I've seen a lot of people call
them the seventeenth century Kardashians. They are Hortense and Marie Mancini,
and they tried to make a place for themselves in
(00:43):
the seventeenth century in Europe, really defying all kinds of
conventions along the way. We mentioned them extremely briefly, like
just a couple of sentences way back when we interviewed
Jason poor Rath about his book and website. Were acted princesses.
(01:03):
So they've had not even like a six impossible episodes
level of exploration. It just really is just like a paragraph.
A thing to note upfront with this episode is that
I love a lot of these two women's stories. There
are big chunks of their lives that are a really
wild ride, and they sound full of adventure and daring
(01:24):
and writing memoirs and hosting salons and becoming the favorites
of various monarchs. But really a lot of this was
also happening as they were trying to get away from
their husbands, both of whom were controlling and abusive and
just frightening. And this was all happening in an era
when women just really didn't have the right to get
(01:45):
a divorce from a bad marriage. So I can see
how just that whole setup would be very troubling two people.
We're also going to talk a little bit about some
pregnancy loss, and there are some very young marriages in
the story, even to the point of seeming inordinately young
(02:08):
given the time period. This is a headset. So Hortense
and Marie Mancini were two of the women known as
the Mazarinets. They were the nieces of Cardinal Jules Main,
chief minister of France, so we need to talk a
little bit about him to set the stage. He was
born Julio Mazzarini in Naples in sixteen o two, and
(02:31):
he changed his name after moving to France, where he
became an advisor and eventually chief minister to King Louis.
In sixteen forty one, Mazarin was named a cardinal and
he was one of the people present at the baptism
of the dauphin the future King Louis the fourteenth, who
of course also became known as the Son. King Louis
(02:53):
died in sixteen forty three. That was when Louis fourt
was still a child, and the young king's mother and
of Austria became his regent. She and Mazarin did not
initially get along. There was some butting of heads, but
he was so charming and persuasive they eventually became very close,
(03:13):
so close that there were rumors that the two of
them were secretly married. Now there is a whole swath
of history that we're kind of skipping over here, including
the Thirty Years War and Mazarin being exiled for a while,
and a series of civil wars in France known as
the Frond. But eventually Mazarin became one of the most
(03:34):
powerful people in France, which itself was one of the
most powerful countries in Europe. He had also become extremely wealthy,
with money and titles and land to pass down to
an Air. He had no children of his own, though
his one surviving nephew had a reputation as an irresponsible libertine,
so Mazarin did not think that this would be a
(03:57):
great candidate for his successor. So he really focused on
his seven nieces, moving all of them from what's now
Italy to France and managing their educations to make sure
that they would be witty and cultured and personable able
to fit into French society. And then he arranged advantageous
marriages for all of them to build a legacy for himself.
(04:21):
That way. Five of Mazzarin's nieces who were the daughters
of Hieronima and Lorenzo Mancini, That included Hortense and Marie,
who were going to come back to you. Their sister
lau Victoire, married Louis de Vendome, Duc de Mercoeur, who
was King Henry the Fourth's grandson. Sadly, she died at
(04:41):
the age of twenty, shortly after giving birth to their
third son. Another sister, olymp married Eugene Maurice of Savoy
Comte Sisson. The youngest mancini sister, Marie Anne, married good
Froy Maurice de Latour du Verne, Duke of Bouillon. Mezzarina's
two other nieces were the two daughters of Girolamo Martinazzi
(05:04):
and Laura Margharita Mazzarini. They were Anne Marie, who married
Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, and Laura, who married Alfonse,
the fourth dest Duke of Modena. In addition to Hortense
and Marie, some of these women wound up being famous
and even notorious in their own ways. There were court
(05:24):
scandals and affairs with kings, and, in the case of
Our Lamp and Mary Anne Mancini, allegations of poisoning people
during the Affair of the Poisons. As its name suggests,
the Affair of the Poisons involved poisonings and alleged poisonings,
and allegations of people using black magic and love potions
to try to sway the king. Previous hosts of the
(05:47):
show did an episode on this. It came out on
January nineteenthn We're not running this one as a Saturday
Classic because it's in the middle of a series that
they did on the House of Bourbon, and it builds
on the previous episodes that they had released over the
prior couple of weeks. It's just a little bit more
in medius race than we would generally try to do.
(06:12):
I think you can follow it. It just was a
little like it's not quite a standalone right, right, so
we didn't want to stick it into the feed by itself.
Marie Mancini was born Anna Maria Mancini on August sixteen
thirty nine. Her younger sister, Hortense, was born or Tensia
Mancini on June six, sixty six. In spite of the
(06:36):
seven year gap in their ages, these two sisters became
very close. In sixteen fifty four, when Marie was fifteen
and Hortense was eight, their caregivers judged them as being
ready to start making their way into French society, but
when Mazzarin met with them, he disagreed with that assessment,
and he sent them to a convent together for another
(06:56):
eighteen months for further study and refinement, just in case
anyone is wondering, why are you not saying her name
as she might have said it in French. She eventually
moved to Britain and everybody knew her his Hortense, and
it seemed weird to change pronunciations part within the episode.
Neither of these sisters was considered to be particularly exceptional
(07:19):
when they were very young. In her younger years, Marie
was described as awkward and uncooperative, while Hortense was pretty
and charming, but also described in terms like apathetic and insignificant.
Seventeenth century French writer Madame de Lafayette wrote of Hortense quote,
she was not only the most beautiful of the cardinals nieces,
(07:42):
but she was the most beautiful of all the court beauties.
Had she been gifted with more intelligence and a greater
vivacity of manner, she would have been perfect. Not that
everyone considered that a weak point for her, for many
people found her careless attitude and languid manner a distinct
a tray action. Once they got to court, Marie caught
(08:03):
the eye of one particular man, the King Louis four,
with the two teens becoming deeply devoted to one another.
So this might sound like a pretty great development, considering
that Cardinal Mazarin was trying to marry his nieces to
high ranking men. Marie's father was a baron, so marrying
the king would have been an enormous step up, But
(08:25):
Louis needed to marry royalty, ideally someone who could solidify
an alliance between France and another powerful country. My sixteen
fifty nine, when the king was twenty and Marie was nineteen,
he was begging to be allowed to marry her, and
meanwhile his mother and her uncle were working to separate them.
(08:47):
Marie was finally sent away from court and the company
of her sister's hortense and mary Anne. Reportedly, the last
thing she said to him was quote, Sire, I am
leaving you to weep, and you are king. In spite
of efforts to keep them apart, Louis and Marie kept
up a continual secret correspondence, including sending one another gifts.
(09:11):
One of these gifts was a puppy sent from Louis
to Marie with a collar that said I belonged to Marie.
That would have been pretty hard to keep secret. Yeah,
I just gonna keep a puppy secret from everybody in
the ends. Marriage was arranged between King Louis the fourteenth
of France and Maria Teresa and Fonta of Spain and
(09:33):
Archduchess of Austria. Their marriage was part of the piece
of the Pyrenees, which ended the Franco Spanish War, Louis
managed to arrange a brief visit to Marie on his
way to make the final marriage negotiations, and during this
visit the two of them had a bunch of very sad,
apologetic like teen romance conversations, most of them happening in
(09:58):
front of her sister Horton's. Then, after Louis was married,
Marie and Hortense followed a process that was outlined in
Ovid's Cures for Love, to ritually get rid of anything
that might remind her of him or otherwise soothe her heartbreak. Meanwhile,
Mazarin was working on arranging a marriage for Marie, not
(10:18):
just to try to put a final end to her
feelings of the king, but also because his own health
was declining and he wanted to make sure all of
his nieces were settled before he died. Marie's marriage contract
to Italian Prince Lorenzo and no Frio Colonna was signed
on February sixteen sixty one. Hortense was married very soon after.
(10:40):
Like her sister, she had already captured the interest of
someone much more powerful than she or her family, and
that was Charles, the second of England at the time,
though he was not on the throne of England. He
was in exile in France, having fled England during the
English Civil Wars. Charles actually proposed to Hortense, but unlike
(11:01):
her sister and Louis the fourteen the issue wasn't that
Charles really needed to make a royal marriage alliance. It
was that Cardinal Mazarin did not think it was very
likely that Charles was actually going to get to return
to the British throne, so he declined this offer. He
was like, no, I'm not marrying my niece to a
deposed king, would the point of that be? However, Charles
(11:26):
was indeed restored as monarch in sixteen sixty, which was
not long after all of this happened. Made a mistake. Instead,
Hortense married armand Charles de Leberty, who had been considered
a suitor for some of her sisters, but who had
always been particularly interested in Hortense, like interested in a
(11:47):
way that multiple people commented on as disturbing and frankly inappropriate.
He had been fixated on her since she was nine,
and he was about fourteen years older than she was
when they married March first of sixteen sixty one. He
was twenty nine and she was just fourteen. Mazarin's acceptance
of this proposal seems to have been largely based on
(12:10):
the fact that he thought Armand would take care of
his estates and his fortune. He had decided that the
vast majority of that fortune was going to go to
whoever Horton's married, and that person would also become the
Duke of Mazarin and inherit Mazarin's other titles. Armand was
deeply religious and mature and responsible, so the Cardinal didn't
(12:33):
think he was likely to just fritter away his inheritance
or otherwise make an embarrassment of his legacy. Armand came
into that inheritance really quickly. Cardinal Jules Mazarin died on
March nine, sixteen sixty one, just days after the wedding.
We're going to talk more about all of this after
a sponsor break. In some ways, Marie and Hortense Mancini's
(13:05):
marriages were similar at first, especially in that both of
them were very focused on having babies and particularly on
trying to have a male heir. After recovering from a
serious illness, and then experiencing a miscarriage. Marie gave birth
to three sons, Felippo, Marcantonio and Carlo, who were born
in sixteen sixty three, sixteen sixty four, and sixteen sixty five.
(13:29):
Hortense had four babies in five years, Marie Charlotte in
sixteen sixty two, Marie Anne in sixteen sixty three, Mario
lamp in sixteen sixty five, and Paul Jules in sixteen
sixty six. But in other ways the early years of
their marriages were almost completely opposite from one another. It
became clear pretty much immediately that Hortense's husband, the new
(13:53):
Duke Mazzin, was a religious fanatic to the point of
being really irrational. He microman inged minute details of the
lives of people who lived on the land that he managed,
arguing that by doing so he was going to save
their souls, and this included things like trying to get
the milkmaids to spend less time milking because he thought
(14:14):
they might find it erotic, and believing that churning milk
into butter was immodest and could lead to arousal sounds
like the milkmaids are not the problem, he ordered mothers
to teach their babies too fast by refusing to nurse
them on Fridays. When a fire broke out at the palace,
he ordered the servants who put it out to be flogged,
(14:35):
and he flogged some of them himself because he thought
that they had interfered with the will of God. He
was also extremely possessive and controlling of virtually everything about
Hortense's life. By the terms of her uncle's will, they
were enormously wealthy as a couple, but almost none of
that wealth was exclusively hers. The only thing of material
(14:58):
value that was actually considered her property and only hers
was her jewelry, which her husband tried to confiscate from
her because he said that it was going to lead
her into temptation. In terms of Marie's marriage, there were
some ways that her husband, Lorenzo, could be controlling. For example,
he blamed her pregnancy loss on her love of riding horses,
(15:19):
and when she got pregnant again, he forced her to
give up riding and to be carried on a sedan chair.
But unlike Hortense's husband, who tried to lock her away
and keep her from anything that might be a temptation,
Marie's husband wanted to show her off hosting masked balls
and salons and lavish galas. They became patrons of the arts, theater,
(15:41):
and culture, and they spent lots of time in Venice,
where they crossed paths with past podcast subject Christina of Sweden.
But Marie's relationship with her husband seems to have really
deteriorated around the time of her pregnancy with their third son.
He had an affair with a another woman who gave
birth to a child that everyone knew was his. Then
(16:05):
Marie had a really difficult delivery and she was worried
that she wouldn't survive another pregnancy. That combined with her
mortification over her husband's affair to lead her to try
to put an end to their physical relationship. Lorenzo, of course,
was not happy about that idea at all. Meanwhile, Hortense,
(16:25):
having provided her husband with a male heir, was trying
to end her physical relationship with him as well armand
had become incredibly controlling and paranoid about every conceivable thing,
all within this framework of extreme religious piety. When Hortense
started trying to avoid him, all of that got worse,
(16:46):
and contrary to what Cardinal Mazarin had expected Armand was
not being that careful with his inheritance. He gave huge
amounts of money away to the church and charities, and
he bought land that wasn't really going to pay off
as an investor ment. Hortense thought that they were going
to wind up with nothing, and in sixteen sixty six
she started trying to legally separate their assets. This wasn't
(17:09):
the same thing as dissolving the marriage. She was just
trying to kind of partition off some of their money
so that it was under her control, just so Armand
couldn't spend at all. When Armand said that they should
pull out their daughter's front teeth so that men would
not find them tempting, Hortense fled to her sister. OLMPLMP
(17:29):
promised to try to protect the children, but she also
didn't really want to bring her sister in to live
with them full time. So a lamp tried to mediate
between Hortense and Armand. Hortense did not think their issues
could be reconciled, and when her husband said that she
could either live with one of her sisters or go
to a convent, she went to the convent while in
(17:51):
the convent, Hortense developed an intense relationship with the Marquise
Maurice ci Doni de carl who was there under charges
of adult dream She was seventeen and Hortense was twenty one,
and together the two of them ran rough shot over
the nuns who were essentially acting as their jailers, including
playing a whole lot of pranks, like putting ink in
(18:13):
the holy water. That's funny. It really sounds almost like, uh,
like a weird comedy about a boarding school, like playing
pranks on the teachers. Marie Sudany helped Hortense with her
legal filings, and eventually Hortense did get a partial victory.
(18:35):
The court ordered that her husband grant her a pension
of twenty thousand livres a year and to document what
he was doing with all of their money. She was
also supposed to return back to their home, while her husband,
who was the grand Master of Artillery, would instead live
at the Arsenal of Paris. Hortense left the convent, but
(18:56):
Armand refused to do any of the things he had
been ordered to do, and also destroyed the theater that
Hortense had used to stage small productions at their home
while she was away. Meanwhile, Marie Sidney reconciled with her husband,
and that was something that made Hortense so jealous that
she told him that Marie ci Dony had been receiving
(19:18):
secret visits from another man. This led to a duel
between Maurice ci Dony's husband and her lover, after which
both of them were imprisoned for violating the prohibition on dueling.
In the face of Urmand's increasingly erratic and frightening behavior,
Hortense moved from trying to legally separate their assets into
(19:40):
a formal separation from their marriage, and on June thirteen,
sixteen sixty eight, she fled to Italy with the help
of her brother Philip and a friend of theirs, the
Chevalier of Rohan. She left her children behind, hoping that
she would be better able to advocate for them away
from her husband. She took a couple of servants with her,
(20:01):
disguised as men. This was just not done. Women of
her social class did not leave their husbands, and they
certainly did not travel without male escorts. The trip itself
involved a perilous journey through the Alps. In Milan, Hortense
reunited with her sister Marie, who had come out from
(20:21):
Rome with her husband. Lorenzo wanted to go back home immediately,
but Hortense and Marie convinced him to stop in Sienna
for a couple of weeks instead, and there they spent
their time riding and hunting, apart from the social norms
that Hortense had really abandoned here. This was basically an
international incident, with Hortense, a duchess, fleeing her home in
(20:44):
France to join her sister, whose husband was an Italian prince.
Hortense also quickly started having an affair with the Chevalier
of Rohan Squire, which was yet another layer of scandal
and also came across as a huge annoyance to Marie
and Lorenzo. They were sort of like, we're trying to
help you out, and you're having this public affair with
(21:04):
the squire, Why are you doing this? More generally, though,
Lorenzo was annoyed with his wife Marie. They were both
living fairly separate lives by this point, but he was
increasingly frustrated by how much money she spent on things
like artwork and improvements to their home and cultural projects
(21:25):
as well. As the many many outings that she took
with her sister. In sixteen seventy one, Marie got really
sick and people thought her husband was poisoning her. Meanwhile,
the chevaliers Squire also accused Philippe and the Chevalier of
trying to poison him. This was during the whole affair
of the poisons era. There was a lot there's a
(21:46):
whole lot of poison going on, poisoning and accused poisoning
and potential poisoning happening. A marriage was arraigned for Philip
that year, and Hortense went with him to Paris to
try to get some kind of legal resolution to her marriage.
Her husband was irate when he heard how Hortense had
been spending her time in Rome. She and her sister
had filled their time with parties and masked balls and
(22:09):
musical performances, with Hortense being so popular with men that
two of them allegedly fought a duel over her armand
called for hortenses arrest, but city officials refused to do it,
and he became so irate that he destroyed a lot
of their art collection. He smashed the genitals of the
(22:29):
statues with a hammer and cut them out of paintings
with scissors. King Louis the fourteenth was upset about this.
In addition to the King's love of and patronage for art,
the king and other people also considered this art collection
that had been destroyed to have been a national treasure.
So whatever goodwill people might have had for Armand at
(22:52):
this point really evaporated. In France. At this time, divorce
as we know it today really didn't exist. There was
a process for separating a couple's assets. Hortense had already
tried that, and separaciendu cour or physical separation, in which
a couple were still technically married but lived legally separated lives.
(23:13):
But this was not common at all, and a lot
of people were still pushing for some kind of reconciliation
between Hortense and Ormand. Hortense proposed that she be allowed
to live in a convent with servants that she chose
and the freedom to come and go. Based on what
had happened with Maurice Doni de corcell The abbesss Is
at the convents proposed as options were pretty wary of
(23:36):
this whole idea. He did not want any more ink
in the holy Water. Finally, still without the settlement that
she wanted, Hortense left Paris again. She returned to her
sister in Rome in May of six seventy one, and
then about a year later both of them fled. We're
going to talk more about that after we paused for
(23:57):
a sponsor break. Marie Mancini's relationship with her husband Lorenzo
had clearly been deteriorating for a long time before she
fled from Rome with her sister Hortense on May twenty nine,
(24:19):
six seventy two. She was afraid of her husband, and
she admired her sister's will, who have left her own
husband armand But if there was like some specific last
straw that prompted Marie to decide to leave, like she
shouldn't note it anywhere. Mr may have just come to
(24:39):
that point. The Mancini sisters wanted to travel unobtrusively, so
they didn't take much with them, apart from some money
and jewelry and a letter of safe passage from King
Louis the fourteenth. The sisters and two maids all warman's
clothing under their dresses, and they took a valet with
them as well. They took steps to try to throw
(24:59):
people off the trail, like getting a carriage and loudly
talking about where they were going when really they were
headed to a boat to make their escape by water. Meanwhile,
Lorenzo kept sending people to find them and trying to
put barriers in the way of their escape, like spreading
the word that people should not give the sisters any
(25:20):
kind of shelter or allow them to pass through areas
where he thought they were headed. He also petitioned King
Louis the fourteenth to intervene. Both Lorenzo and Armand worried
about how their wives behavior would reflect on them, and
there were broader concerns about how the sisters might inspire
other women in unhappy or abusive marriages to also leave.
(25:44):
I have feelings. As the Mancini sisters headed for France,
this was once again an international incident. Marie really thought
that if she could go speak to King Louis the
fourteenth in person, that he might support her petition to
leave her husband, but she couldn't get permission to actually go.
Once they were traveling over land again, the two women
(26:05):
traveled by post with the hope that they would be
harder to track, but the king sent messengers to the
post stations telling them to refuse to give the sisters horses.
That was something that the sisters overcame with bribes. After
some close calls, Hortense and Marie decided to split up,
with Marie traveling through France and Horton's going to Chambre,
(26:27):
which today is part of France but at the time
was part of the independent Duchy of Savoy. There she
found a patron with Charles Emmanuel, the second Duke of Savoy,
who had actually been one of the men whose offer
of marriage Hortense's uncle had not accepted many years before.
(26:48):
This Duke seems to have thought that Hortense would liven
up his court, which she eventually did, but first she
spent a stretch of time mostly in prayer and reflection
and writing a whole lot of letters. King Louis the
fourteen had offered her some financial support, and so she
wrote a lot of letters to the king to try
to maintain his goodwill even though she had done something
(27:11):
as scandalous as leaving her husband. She also wrote letters
to her sister's husband to try to convince him that
Marie's leaving had been her own decision, not something that
Hortense had forced her or caused her to do. Towards
the end of Hortense's time and Savoy, when she was
twenty nine, she wrote her memoirs. These were published in
(27:33):
sixty under the title Memoir d M L d M
or Memoir de madond ch There was already so much
rumor and gossip about her life and her relationship with
her husband that she just decided to put her own
side of the story out there publicly and in print.
This made her one of the first women in Europe
(27:54):
to publish her own story under her own name and
for a general audience rather than us for her family
and friends. Meanwhile, Marie was trying to evade various messengers
that she knew were carrying orders for her to stop
where she was. It's basically like, if they don't find me,
I don't have to stop. One of them did finally
(28:16):
catch up to her, though, and then she was presented
with a series of proposals that would involve her returning
to her husband. She rejected all of those and said
that she wanted to enter a convent of her choice,
something that she pointed out that thousands of other women
had done after being widowed or otherwise separated from their husbands.
(28:38):
Once she had made her whole position on this clear,
she apparently picked up a guitar and started playing it
as though she had just said all she had to
say about that and moved on. One of the accounts
that I read said that she had kept this guitar
with her the entire time since leaving room, But it
also said that they left without a lot of luggage,
so I'm not sure where the guitar came from, but
(28:59):
I love that story. I liked the idea of the
guitar being her version of La la la La I'm
not listening to. Eventually, Marie was allowed to go to
a convent in Lease, about forty miles outside of Paris,
which is one of the convents Hortense had stayed in previously.
At first, Marie had regular visits from her sister's olymp
(29:21):
and Marianne, and her husband sent some of her servants
with some of her belongings that she had requested, but
Lorenzo had sent one of those servants to act as
a spy, and soon Marie was being allowed visits only
from her sisters. Marie later moved to another convent that
was farther from Paris, but she was even less happy there.
(29:43):
It wasn't as comfortable, and she said that the air
was bad and made her sick. At one point, Marie
arranged a visit to her sister Hortense, but Hortense seems
to have intentionally avoided Marie by going on a trip
to the country instead. I don't think this was just
the case of bad timing. I think it was on purpose.
Hortense may have been worried that if she really welcomed
(30:06):
her sister, she would run afoul of some of the
good graces that at that point we're keeping her relatively safe.
But when Marie later wrote the Hortense asking for her protection,
Hortense and the Duke of Savoy arranged for Marie to
enter a convent and Turin. Marie was just really hoping
to find a place where she would have a little
(30:27):
more comfort and autonomy. But after a really perilous journey
through territory that was caught up in the Franco Dutch
War in the winter, she wound up at a convent
where she had even less freedom than she'd had before.
After Hortense's memoirs were published, Marie got a copy. The
memoirs had been so popular that other people started writing
(30:50):
and publishing fake versions of their own. Some of these
were wildly inaccurate about both sisters, including totally distorted versions
of Marie's experiences. So she followed in her sister's footsteps
and she published her own memoir, The Truth in its
Own Light or The Genuine Memoirs of m Mancini Constables Cologna.
(31:12):
Around this time, Hortense was working on plans to leave Savoy.
She and her staff just kind of weren't getting along
with people anymore as she was trying to make those arrangements. Though,
the Duke died suddenly on June twelfth, seventy five, at
the age of only forty. The Duke's son, Victor Amadeus
(31:34):
the Second, was only nine, so his widow was acting
as regent, but she had really never been a fan
of Hortense. She told Hortense that she was no longer
welcome at the late Duke's court. The Duke's death was
also a blow to Marie because even though she had
not been living in Savoy, I'm not sure if these
two ever even actually met. She had written him really
(31:55):
often and counted him as one of her allies. After
the Duke's death, Hortense started making her way to England,
where she had a cousin, and she got a letter
from Ralph Montague passing on an invitation from Charles the Second.
The Franco Dutch War was still ongoing, so Hortense's journey
was perilous. She arrived on New Year's Eve sixteen seventy five.
(32:18):
Charles the Second, of course, was nicknamed the Merry Monarch.
He was famous for having a whole lot of affairs,
and as we said earlier, he was one of the
people who had offered to marry Hortense Mancini decades before.
She also had a reputation for being very charming and
witty and attractive and popular with men. So there were
(32:38):
fears at court that the King might be a little
bit overly interested in her, and that she might kind
of throw off the balance of his other relationships and
this like house of affairs cards would turn into chaos.
These fears were founded. Soon the King and Horton were
(33:00):
having an affair, and he had granted her at pension
in sixteen seventy six, Hortense Mancini started hosting salons in England,
ones that were open to women and gave them opportunities
to learn and experience art and culture free from many
of the cultural restraints that were normally placed on them.
Her friend Charles des Saint Evermond acted as co host,
(33:23):
and sometimes the two of them are credited with popularizing
champagne in England. Charles imported it from France and they
served at the salon. Hortense also had a lot of pets,
including dogs and cats and parrots and other exotic birds,
and she had gambling tables, which led some people to
write off her salon as a gambling den. Hortense Mancini
(33:45):
had affairs throughout her life away from her husband, and
one of the most notorious was while she was in England.
It was with Anne, Countess of Sussex, who was one
of the King's illegitimate daughters. Although she was only fourteen
and was already married to a man named Thomas Leonard,
who was one of the gentlemen of the King's bed chamber,
(34:07):
Neither Hortense nor Anne seemed upset by rumors that they
were lovers, and they really did not try to contradict them.
One of the people who commented on this was Lady Chaworth,
who wrote this in a letter to her brother, Lord
Ruth on December six quote, Lady Sussex is not yet gone,
but my Lord is better and holds his resolution of
(34:29):
going as soon as the weather breaks up to make
good travailing. She and Madame Mazzarin have privately learned to
fence and went down into St James Park the other
day with drawn swords under their nightgowns, which they drew
out and made several fine passes with to the admiration
of several men that was onlookers in the park. And
another letter she wrote quote Lady Sussex is mightily pleased
(34:53):
with fox hunting and hair hunting, but kisses Madame Mazarin's
picture with much effects and still This might have been
after Ann's husband demanded that she come back from Hortense's lodgings,
and she was forcibly removed from there. Hortense had various
other affairs, including a possible one with past podcast subject
(35:14):
afro Ben. Her relationship with the Count of Monico eventually
became public and close enough that King Charles called off
his affair with her, but he wasn't so upset about
it that he made her go back to France instead.
Hortense kept up an active social life in her house
in St. James's Park, including being reunited with Maurice I
Donni de Carcel when she came to visit London. While
(35:37):
Hortense was having what sounds like a pretty fabulous time
in London, Marie made her way to Madrid and she
moved into another convent. While there, she was reunited with
her sons, who by now were teenagers. Her husband, Lorenzo
kept trying to restrict her movements. He seems to have
kind of allowed her to go to Madrid, thinking that
(36:00):
family members he had there would help keep her in line.
But officials in Madrid seemed less inclined to do what
Lorenzo wanted them to do. The Archbishop of Caesara wrote
him a letter that said, in part quote, here we
do not treat our wives as you do in Italy.
Your wish to put her in a prison is not
(36:20):
enough to see it done. But Lorenzo would not give
up in his efforts to get her to return to
their marriage, or if not that at least to be
able to control her comings and goings. Eventually, he ordered
her imprisonment in a medieval fortress in Seville known as
the Alcazar, something even her detractors thought was too extreme
(36:41):
because this was a cold, drafty place and this was
happening in the middle of winter. In sight one, Lorenzo
proposed that Marie enter the convent as a novice, meaning
that she would be on her way to taking steps
to becoming a nun, rather than just being sheltered in
the convents. He said that he would be taking holy
(37:03):
orders as well. Marie agreed to this, although Lorenzo did
not hold up his end of the bargain to take
holy orders of his own. Meanwhile, back in England, Hortense
had fallen under suspicion in the wake of the Popish plot.
This was not a real plot. It was based on
fabricated allegations by Anglican clergyman Titus Oates that Jesuits were
(37:26):
planning to assassinate Charles the Second. Even though this was
not true, a lot of people believed it, and since
Hortense was Catholic and a foreigner, people began to distrust her. Then,
in sixteen eighty four, her nephew, Philippe, who was her
sister Olimp's son, challenged one of Hortense's admirers to a
duel and killed him. In France, this was a huge scandal,
(37:50):
and people blamed Hortense for not being a better influence
on him. Then, in February of six five, King Charles
the Second died. His successor, James the Second and seventh,
continued to support Hortense financially, but he was deposed in
the Glorious Revolution of sixteen eight. A year later, on
(38:10):
April fifteenth, sixteen eighty nine, Marie's husband, Lorenzo and Afrio
colonnad died, and as a widow, Marie finally had some
of the freedom that she had been trying to get
for herself for most of her life. She reconnected with
her sons and she traveled. She also reconnected with her
old friend or Tensia Stella, who had been one of
(38:32):
her ladies in waiting and who also was one of
the women that Lorenzo had had an affair with. Lorenzo
and or Tensia Stella had two children that Lorenzo had
formally recognized, and these two women each worked to help
the other one out with various issues that were related
to Lorenzo's estate. Well, we kind of both got in
(38:54):
this mess. Possibly inspired by Lorenzo's death, Armand sued Hortense
in sixteen nine during a formal separation hearing. He vilified
her as a gambler and libertine, and the legal arguments
surrounding the hearing were published afterward. The case was decided
(39:14):
in the Duke's favor, and Hortense was ordered to return
to France, first to a convent and then to her husband,
and she said she would rather die. It was not
possible for Armand to force Hortense to return, though it
might have been, except that the Nine Years War had
started the year before, and England and France were at
(39:37):
war with one another. Hortense just defied this order and
stayed where she was, although she had to move into
smaller and smaller lodgings as her money dwindled. By June
of sixte Hortense was described as increasingly depressed, including drinking
too much, not eating enough, and deeply in debt. She
(39:58):
died on July two, six John Evelyn wrote about it
in his diary on the eleventh, describing her as quote
an extraordinary beauty and wit, but dissolute and impatient of
matrimonial restraint. After paying off her debts, Armand had Hortense's
body embalmed and returned to France. He took it through
(40:20):
what seems like an intentionally planned roundabout and very long route,
traveling through places that he knew that she hated to
get there the drama. Marie Mancini's last year seemed to
have been more comfortable and happier than her sister's. She
did not have much of her own, but her sons
(40:41):
were generous with her. She traveled when things like the
Nine Years War weren't making it too dangerous to do so.
She died in Pisa on May eighth, seventeen fifteen, and
she was buried there. She had asked to be buried
wherever it was she happened to be when she died.
Her first love, Louis the fourteen, died a few months later.
(41:01):
There are lots of books about Hortense Mancini and Marie Mancini,
and others of their sisters and the affair of the
poisons that's come up a couple of times. One of
the books that's focused to just on Hortons and Marie
is the King's Mistresses. The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini,
Princess Colowna and her sister, Horton's Duchess Mazarin that came
(41:21):
out in There's also a pretty new translation of their
groundbreaking memoirs which came out in two thousand eight from
the University of Chicago Press. Do you also have listener
mail after this rollicking wild ride? I do. This listener
mail is from Meredith and it actually there's the listener
mail and then also an addendum to the listener mail.
(41:43):
So Meredith wrote, Hey, Holly and Tracy, I'm a longtime
listener of your show and have I think listen to
every episode. I wanted to write and say a few
things about your recent episode on Edward May's Monster. The
first being that, as a hospice nurse practitioner who's married
to a cardiac surgeon, I thought I was tough enough
to eat my lunch while listening to this episode end,
(42:04):
I was not so props on that accomplishment of thoroughly
grossing out a hardened medical feel betteran like myself. Secondly,
the first thing I thought of when listening to May's
description of the monster was, Hey, that's what an aortic
plaque looks like. My husband routinely pulls giant plaques and
or cloths out of people's bodies. I've seen a fair
(42:25):
few pictures of the ones who's gotten to include in
papers and the like. I'm not quite sure if that's
exactly what the Lancet researcher was referring to when she
concluded that it was hardened plasma, as plasma is the
clear part of the blood, and plaques are made up
of fatty deposits found in plasma. But anyway, it does
happen that an aortic plaque loosens from the arterial wall
(42:46):
and travels into the heart, causing sorts of damage and
or death, or could have traveled there after death. I
don't know if an entire aortic plaque could wedge into
a ventricle, but anyway, I thought it was interesting. I
attached a picture from Wikipedia, not one of my husband ones,
and it does look a lot like me description. The
first one was taken from a body post mortem. In
the second is a scan of what's in a person
(43:07):
with a plaques descending a order. Thanks for all your
work on the podcast. I look forward to it every week.
I wrote back, was like, this is so great. I
similarly went down a Google a Google image rabbit hole
with terms like plasma clot and post mortem clot as
I was like trying to figure out what this might
have been, and it was like right after I had
(43:29):
eaten lunch, and I similarly was a little a little
gross dout. I was like, this is not the correct
timing of how I should have ordered my day. So
then I got to follow up from Meredith, who said,
so I talked to my husband and he says the
aortic plaque couldn't end up in the ventricle because if
they loosen, they traveled downstream, not up. However, sometimes the
(43:50):
plaqueforms attached to a calcified aortic valve, which would also
form a similar shape if pulled out with a triangle head.
Should actually have been calcified valve. Still not sure how
they would find it all in the ventricle. Probably depends
on how they opened it, etcetera. If they were just
mistaken that it was all in the ventricle. Anyway, just
(44:11):
making sure I didn't give you bad info. So I
loved this whole email from the pros. Yeah, I don't
know why. I did not foresee that that episode would
prompt people to send in medical images. But this is
not the only email that we got that had images
(44:33):
of like clots and plaques and et cetera attached to it.
So thank you for sending this possibility about something that
may have been going on. We also got an email
from somebody saying that it might have been a thrombus,
which is another word for a blood clot. And I
think the reason that the two people whose papers I
found that were in like the late early one century
(44:56):
about these the reason that I think they didn't just
say it was a blood clot is that it's described
in May's writing as having been white, and most of
the time blood clots are read, I have been told
that they can look quite in some circumstances, but like
that's I think that's what's driving that description. So anyway,
(45:18):
thank you Meredith for this fascinating email and the pictures.
Um And I'm sorry for all of the various people
who are who we grossed out with this episode, because
we did also get some comments about how gross it was.
I feel like I can be squeamish, and none of
that grossed me out, and I'm like, have I become
a monster? The episode itself didn't gross me out, but
(45:39):
the pictures that I looked at when I was in
my Google search, my Google image search rabbit hole, those
did gross me out. None of it was nearly as
gross to me as like, I have a specific, vivid
memory of which which episode has ever been the grossest
to me? And it was the Terror episode. Oh yeah,
that didn't gross me on. Maybe I'm not squeamish as
(46:00):
I thought. I just don't want to watch a facelift.
I'll watch anything else. Yeah, there was one particular moment
in that episode that I I had to read it
and I read it really fast because it was really
grist me out. Anyway, you can go find that episode
yourself if you're curious. It's about the guy named Tara. Anyway,
thanks again for this email. If you would like to
(46:21):
send us a note, We're at History Podcast at I
heart radio dot com. We're all over social media at
missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter,
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the I heart radio app and wherever else you'd like
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(46:43):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
i heart Radio, visit the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today we're
going to talk about a pair of sisters who, along
(00:21):
with their other sisters and their cousins, get a lot
of comparisons to whatever influencer slash media celebrity is making
the most headlines at any given moment. Like over the
past few years, I've seen a lot of people call
them the seventeenth century Kardashians. They are Hortense and Marie Mancini,
and they tried to make a place for themselves in
(00:43):
the seventeenth century in Europe, really defying all kinds of
conventions along the way. We mentioned them extremely briefly, like
just a couple of sentences way back when we interviewed
Jason poor Rath about his book and website. Were acted princesses.
(01:03):
So they've had not even like a six impossible episodes
level of exploration. It just really is just like a paragraph.
A thing to note upfront with this episode is that
I love a lot of these two women's stories. There
are big chunks of their lives that are a really
wild ride, and they sound full of adventure and daring
(01:24):
and writing memoirs and hosting salons and becoming the favorites
of various monarchs. But really a lot of this was
also happening as they were trying to get away from
their husbands, both of whom were controlling and abusive and
just frightening. And this was all happening in an era
when women just really didn't have the right to get
(01:45):
a divorce from a bad marriage. So I can see
how just that whole setup would be very troubling two people.
We're also going to talk a little bit about some
pregnancy loss, and there are some very young marriages in
the story, even to the point of seeming inordinately young
(02:08):
given the time period. This is a headset. So Hortense
and Marie Mancini were two of the women known as
the Mazarinets. They were the nieces of Cardinal Jules Main,
chief minister of France, so we need to talk a
little bit about him to set the stage. He was
born Julio Mazzarini in Naples in sixteen o two, and
(02:31):
he changed his name after moving to France, where he
became an advisor and eventually chief minister to King Louis.
In sixteen forty one, Mazarin was named a cardinal and
he was one of the people present at the baptism
of the dauphin the future King Louis the fourteenth, who
of course also became known as the Son. King Louis
(02:53):
died in sixteen forty three. That was when Louis fourt
was still a child, and the young king's mother and
of Austria became his regent. She and Mazarin did not
initially get along. There was some butting of heads, but
he was so charming and persuasive they eventually became very close,
(03:13):
so close that there were rumors that the two of
them were secretly married. Now there is a whole swath
of history that we're kind of skipping over here, including
the Thirty Years War and Mazarin being exiled for a while,
and a series of civil wars in France known as
the Frond. But eventually Mazarin became one of the most
(03:34):
powerful people in France, which itself was one of the
most powerful countries in Europe. He had also become extremely wealthy,
with money and titles and land to pass down to
an Air. He had no children of his own, though
his one surviving nephew had a reputation as an irresponsible libertine,
so Mazarin did not think that this would be a
(03:57):
great candidate for his successor. So he really focused on
his seven nieces, moving all of them from what's now
Italy to France and managing their educations to make sure
that they would be witty and cultured and personable able
to fit into French society. And then he arranged advantageous
marriages for all of them to build a legacy for himself.
(04:21):
That way. Five of Mazzarin's nieces who were the daughters
of Hieronima and Lorenzo Mancini, That included Hortense and Marie,
who were going to come back to you. Their sister
lau Victoire, married Louis de Vendome, Duc de Mercoeur, who
was King Henry the Fourth's grandson. Sadly, she died at
(04:41):
the age of twenty, shortly after giving birth to their
third son. Another sister, olymp married Eugene Maurice of Savoy
Comte Sisson. The youngest mancini sister, Marie Anne, married good
Froy Maurice de Latour du Verne, Duke of Bouillon. Mezzarina's
two other nieces were the two daughters of Girolamo Martinazzi
(05:04):
and Laura Margharita Mazzarini. They were Anne Marie, who married
Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, and Laura, who married Alfonse,
the fourth dest Duke of Modena. In addition to Hortense
and Marie, some of these women wound up being famous
and even notorious in their own ways. There were court
(05:24):
scandals and affairs with kings, and, in the case of
Our Lamp and Mary Anne Mancini, allegations of poisoning people
during the Affair of the Poisons. As its name suggests,
the Affair of the Poisons involved poisonings and alleged poisonings,
and allegations of people using black magic and love potions
to try to sway the king. Previous hosts of the
(05:47):
show did an episode on this. It came out on
January nineteenthn We're not running this one as a Saturday
Classic because it's in the middle of a series that
they did on the House of Bourbon, and it builds
on the previous episodes that they had released over the
prior couple of weeks. It's just a little bit more
in medius race than we would generally try to do.
(06:12):
I think you can follow it. It just was a
little like it's not quite a standalone right, right, so
we didn't want to stick it into the feed by itself.
Marie Mancini was born Anna Maria Mancini on August sixteen
thirty nine. Her younger sister, Hortense, was born or Tensia
Mancini on June six, sixty six. In spite of the
(06:36):
seven year gap in their ages, these two sisters became
very close. In sixteen fifty four, when Marie was fifteen
and Hortense was eight, their caregivers judged them as being
ready to start making their way into French society, but
when Mazzarin met with them, he disagreed with that assessment,
and he sent them to a convent together for another
(06:56):
eighteen months for further study and refinement, just in case
anyone is wondering, why are you not saying her name
as she might have said it in French. She eventually
moved to Britain and everybody knew her his Hortense, and
it seemed weird to change pronunciations part within the episode.
Neither of these sisters was considered to be particularly exceptional
(07:19):
when they were very young. In her younger years, Marie
was described as awkward and uncooperative, while Hortense was pretty
and charming, but also described in terms like apathetic and insignificant.
Seventeenth century French writer Madame de Lafayette wrote of Hortense quote,
she was not only the most beautiful of the cardinals nieces,
(07:42):
but she was the most beautiful of all the court beauties.
Had she been gifted with more intelligence and a greater
vivacity of manner, she would have been perfect. Not that
everyone considered that a weak point for her, for many
people found her careless attitude and languid manner a distinct
a tray action. Once they got to court, Marie caught
(08:03):
the eye of one particular man, the King Louis four,
with the two teens becoming deeply devoted to one another.
So this might sound like a pretty great development, considering
that Cardinal Mazarin was trying to marry his nieces to
high ranking men. Marie's father was a baron, so marrying
the king would have been an enormous step up, But
(08:25):
Louis needed to marry royalty, ideally someone who could solidify
an alliance between France and another powerful country. My sixteen
fifty nine, when the king was twenty and Marie was nineteen,
he was begging to be allowed to marry her, and
meanwhile his mother and her uncle were working to separate them.
(08:47):
Marie was finally sent away from court and the company
of her sister's hortense and mary Anne. Reportedly, the last
thing she said to him was quote, Sire, I am
leaving you to weep, and you are king. In spite
of efforts to keep them apart, Louis and Marie kept
up a continual secret correspondence, including sending one another gifts.
(09:11):
One of these gifts was a puppy sent from Louis
to Marie with a collar that said I belonged to Marie.
That would have been pretty hard to keep secret. Yeah,
I just gonna keep a puppy secret from everybody in
the ends. Marriage was arranged between King Louis the fourteenth
of France and Maria Teresa and Fonta of Spain and
(09:33):
Archduchess of Austria. Their marriage was part of the piece
of the Pyrenees, which ended the Franco Spanish War, Louis
managed to arrange a brief visit to Marie on his
way to make the final marriage negotiations, and during this
visit the two of them had a bunch of very sad,
apologetic like teen romance conversations, most of them happening in
(09:58):
front of her sister Horton's. Then, after Louis was married,
Marie and Hortense followed a process that was outlined in
Ovid's Cures for Love, to ritually get rid of anything
that might remind her of him or otherwise soothe her heartbreak. Meanwhile,
Mazarin was working on arranging a marriage for Marie, not
(10:18):
just to try to put a final end to her
feelings of the king, but also because his own health
was declining and he wanted to make sure all of
his nieces were settled before he died. Marie's marriage contract
to Italian Prince Lorenzo and no Frio Colonna was signed
on February sixteen sixty one. Hortense was married very soon after.
(10:40):
Like her sister, she had already captured the interest of
someone much more powerful than she or her family, and
that was Charles, the second of England at the time,
though he was not on the throne of England. He
was in exile in France, having fled England during the
English Civil Wars. Charles actually proposed to Hortense, but unlike
(11:01):
her sister and Louis the fourteen the issue wasn't that
Charles really needed to make a royal marriage alliance. It
was that Cardinal Mazarin did not think it was very
likely that Charles was actually going to get to return
to the British throne, so he declined this offer. He
was like, no, I'm not marrying my niece to a
deposed king, would the point of that be? However, Charles
(11:26):
was indeed restored as monarch in sixteen sixty, which was
not long after all of this happened. Made a mistake. Instead,
Hortense married armand Charles de Leberty, who had been considered
a suitor for some of her sisters, but who had
always been particularly interested in Hortense, like interested in a
(11:47):
way that multiple people commented on as disturbing and frankly inappropriate.
He had been fixated on her since she was nine,
and he was about fourteen years older than she was
when they married March first of sixteen sixty one. He
was twenty nine and she was just fourteen. Mazarin's acceptance
of this proposal seems to have been largely based on
(12:10):
the fact that he thought Armand would take care of
his estates and his fortune. He had decided that the
vast majority of that fortune was going to go to
whoever Horton's married, and that person would also become the
Duke of Mazarin and inherit Mazarin's other titles. Armand was
deeply religious and mature and responsible, so the Cardinal didn't
(12:33):
think he was likely to just fritter away his inheritance
or otherwise make an embarrassment of his legacy. Armand came
into that inheritance really quickly. Cardinal Jules Mazarin died on
March nine, sixteen sixty one, just days after the wedding.
We're going to talk more about all of this after
a sponsor break. In some ways, Marie and Hortense Mancini's
(13:05):
marriages were similar at first, especially in that both of
them were very focused on having babies and particularly on
trying to have a male heir. After recovering from a
serious illness, and then experiencing a miscarriage. Marie gave birth
to three sons, Felippo, Marcantonio and Carlo, who were born
in sixteen sixty three, sixteen sixty four, and sixteen sixty five.
(13:29):
Hortense had four babies in five years, Marie Charlotte in
sixteen sixty two, Marie Anne in sixteen sixty three, Mario
lamp in sixteen sixty five, and Paul Jules in sixteen
sixty six. But in other ways the early years of
their marriages were almost completely opposite from one another. It
became clear pretty much immediately that Hortense's husband, the new
(13:53):
Duke Mazzin, was a religious fanatic to the point of
being really irrational. He microman inged minute details of the
lives of people who lived on the land that he managed,
arguing that by doing so he was going to save
their souls, and this included things like trying to get
the milkmaids to spend less time milking because he thought
(14:14):
they might find it erotic, and believing that churning milk
into butter was immodest and could lead to arousal sounds
like the milkmaids are not the problem, he ordered mothers
to teach their babies too fast by refusing to nurse
them on Fridays. When a fire broke out at the palace,
he ordered the servants who put it out to be flogged,
(14:35):
and he flogged some of them himself because he thought
that they had interfered with the will of God. He
was also extremely possessive and controlling of virtually everything about
Hortense's life. By the terms of her uncle's will, they
were enormously wealthy as a couple, but almost none of
that wealth was exclusively hers. The only thing of material
(14:58):
value that was actually considered her property and only hers
was her jewelry, which her husband tried to confiscate from
her because he said that it was going to lead
her into temptation. In terms of Marie's marriage, there were
some ways that her husband, Lorenzo, could be controlling. For example,
he blamed her pregnancy loss on her love of riding horses,
(15:19):
and when she got pregnant again, he forced her to
give up riding and to be carried on a sedan chair.
But unlike Hortense's husband, who tried to lock her away
and keep her from anything that might be a temptation,
Marie's husband wanted to show her off hosting masked balls
and salons and lavish galas. They became patrons of the arts, theater,
(15:41):
and culture, and they spent lots of time in Venice,
where they crossed paths with past podcast subject Christina of Sweden.
But Marie's relationship with her husband seems to have really
deteriorated around the time of her pregnancy with their third son.
He had an affair with a another woman who gave
birth to a child that everyone knew was his. Then
(16:05):
Marie had a really difficult delivery and she was worried
that she wouldn't survive another pregnancy. That combined with her
mortification over her husband's affair to lead her to try
to put an end to their physical relationship. Lorenzo, of course,
was not happy about that idea at all. Meanwhile, Hortense,
(16:25):
having provided her husband with a male heir, was trying
to end her physical relationship with him as well armand
had become incredibly controlling and paranoid about every conceivable thing,
all within this framework of extreme religious piety. When Hortense
started trying to avoid him, all of that got worse,
(16:46):
and contrary to what Cardinal Mazarin had expected Armand was
not being that careful with his inheritance. He gave huge
amounts of money away to the church and charities, and
he bought land that wasn't really going to pay off
as an investor ment. Hortense thought that they were going
to wind up with nothing, and in sixteen sixty six
she started trying to legally separate their assets. This wasn't
(17:09):
the same thing as dissolving the marriage. She was just
trying to kind of partition off some of their money
so that it was under her control, just so Armand
couldn't spend at all. When Armand said that they should
pull out their daughter's front teeth so that men would
not find them tempting, Hortense fled to her sister. OLMPLMP
(17:29):
promised to try to protect the children, but she also
didn't really want to bring her sister in to live
with them full time. So a lamp tried to mediate
between Hortense and Armand. Hortense did not think their issues
could be reconciled, and when her husband said that she
could either live with one of her sisters or go
to a convent, she went to the convent while in
(17:51):
the convent, Hortense developed an intense relationship with the Marquise
Maurice ci Doni de carl who was there under charges
of adult dream She was seventeen and Hortense was twenty one,
and together the two of them ran rough shot over
the nuns who were essentially acting as their jailers, including
playing a whole lot of pranks, like putting ink in
(18:13):
the holy water. That's funny. It really sounds almost like, uh,
like a weird comedy about a boarding school, like playing
pranks on the teachers. Marie Sudany helped Hortense with her
legal filings, and eventually Hortense did get a partial victory.
(18:35):
The court ordered that her husband grant her a pension
of twenty thousand livres a year and to document what
he was doing with all of their money. She was
also supposed to return back to their home, while her husband,
who was the grand Master of Artillery, would instead live
at the Arsenal of Paris. Hortense left the convent, but
(18:56):
Armand refused to do any of the things he had
been ordered to do, and also destroyed the theater that
Hortense had used to stage small productions at their home
while she was away. Meanwhile, Marie Sidney reconciled with her husband,
and that was something that made Hortense so jealous that
she told him that Marie ci Dony had been receiving
(19:18):
secret visits from another man. This led to a duel
between Maurice ci Dony's husband and her lover, after which
both of them were imprisoned for violating the prohibition on dueling.
In the face of Urmand's increasingly erratic and frightening behavior,
Hortense moved from trying to legally separate their assets into
(19:40):
a formal separation from their marriage, and on June thirteen,
sixteen sixty eight, she fled to Italy with the help
of her brother Philip and a friend of theirs, the
Chevalier of Rohan. She left her children behind, hoping that
she would be better able to advocate for them away
from her husband. She took a couple of servants with her,
(20:01):
disguised as men. This was just not done. Women of
her social class did not leave their husbands, and they
certainly did not travel without male escorts. The trip itself
involved a perilous journey through the Alps. In Milan, Hortense
reunited with her sister Marie, who had come out from
(20:21):
Rome with her husband. Lorenzo wanted to go back home immediately,
but Hortense and Marie convinced him to stop in Sienna
for a couple of weeks instead, and there they spent
their time riding and hunting, apart from the social norms
that Hortense had really abandoned here. This was basically an
international incident, with Hortense, a duchess, fleeing her home in
(20:44):
France to join her sister, whose husband was an Italian prince.
Hortense also quickly started having an affair with the Chevalier
of Rohan Squire, which was yet another layer of scandal
and also came across as a huge annoyance to Marie
and Lorenzo. They were sort of like, we're trying to
help you out, and you're having this public affair with
(21:04):
the squire, Why are you doing this? More generally, though,
Lorenzo was annoyed with his wife Marie. They were both
living fairly separate lives by this point, but he was
increasingly frustrated by how much money she spent on things
like artwork and improvements to their home and cultural projects
(21:25):
as well. As the many many outings that she took
with her sister. In sixteen seventy one, Marie got really
sick and people thought her husband was poisoning her. Meanwhile,
the chevaliers Squire also accused Philippe and the Chevalier of
trying to poison him. This was during the whole affair
of the poisons era. There was a lot there's a
(21:46):
whole lot of poison going on, poisoning and accused poisoning
and potential poisoning happening. A marriage was arraigned for Philip
that year, and Hortense went with him to Paris to
try to get some kind of legal resolution to her marriage.
Her husband was irate when he heard how Hortense had
been spending her time in Rome. She and her sister
had filled their time with parties and masked balls and
(22:09):
musical performances, with Hortense being so popular with men that
two of them allegedly fought a duel over her armand
called for hortenses arrest, but city officials refused to do it,
and he became so irate that he destroyed a lot
of their art collection. He smashed the genitals of the
(22:29):
statues with a hammer and cut them out of paintings
with scissors. King Louis the fourteenth was upset about this.
In addition to the King's love of and patronage for art,
the king and other people also considered this art collection
that had been destroyed to have been a national treasure.
So whatever goodwill people might have had for Armand at
(22:52):
this point really evaporated. In France. At this time, divorce
as we know it today really didn't exist. There was
a process for separating a couple's assets. Hortense had already
tried that, and separaciendu cour or physical separation, in which
a couple were still technically married but lived legally separated lives.
(23:13):
But this was not common at all, and a lot
of people were still pushing for some kind of reconciliation
between Hortense and Ormand. Hortense proposed that she be allowed
to live in a convent with servants that she chose
and the freedom to come and go. Based on what
had happened with Maurice Doni de corcell The abbesss Is
at the convents proposed as options were pretty wary of
(23:36):
this whole idea. He did not want any more ink
in the holy Water. Finally, still without the settlement that
she wanted, Hortense left Paris again. She returned to her
sister in Rome in May of six seventy one, and
then about a year later both of them fled. We're
going to talk more about that after we paused for
(23:57):
a sponsor break. Marie Mancini's relationship with her husband Lorenzo
had clearly been deteriorating for a long time before she
fled from Rome with her sister Hortense on May twenty nine,
(24:19):
six seventy two. She was afraid of her husband, and
she admired her sister's will, who have left her own
husband armand But if there was like some specific last
straw that prompted Marie to decide to leave, like she
shouldn't note it anywhere. Mr may have just come to
(24:39):
that point. The Mancini sisters wanted to travel unobtrusively, so
they didn't take much with them, apart from some money
and jewelry and a letter of safe passage from King
Louis the fourteenth. The sisters and two maids all warman's
clothing under their dresses, and they took a valet with
them as well. They took steps to try to throw
(24:59):
people off the trail, like getting a carriage and loudly
talking about where they were going when really they were
headed to a boat to make their escape by water. Meanwhile,
Lorenzo kept sending people to find them and trying to
put barriers in the way of their escape, like spreading
the word that people should not give the sisters any
(25:20):
kind of shelter or allow them to pass through areas
where he thought they were headed. He also petitioned King
Louis the fourteenth to intervene. Both Lorenzo and Armand worried
about how their wives behavior would reflect on them, and
there were broader concerns about how the sisters might inspire
other women in unhappy or abusive marriages to also leave.
(25:44):
I have feelings. As the Mancini sisters headed for France,
this was once again an international incident. Marie really thought
that if she could go speak to King Louis the
fourteenth in person, that he might support her petition to
leave her husband, but she couldn't get permission to actually go.
Once they were traveling over land again, the two women
(26:05):
traveled by post with the hope that they would be
harder to track, but the king sent messengers to the
post stations telling them to refuse to give the sisters horses.
That was something that the sisters overcame with bribes. After
some close calls, Hortense and Marie decided to split up,
with Marie traveling through France and Horton's going to Chambre,
(26:27):
which today is part of France but at the time
was part of the independent Duchy of Savoy. There she
found a patron with Charles Emmanuel, the second Duke of Savoy,
who had actually been one of the men whose offer
of marriage Hortense's uncle had not accepted many years before.
(26:48):
This Duke seems to have thought that Hortense would liven
up his court, which she eventually did, but first she
spent a stretch of time mostly in prayer and reflection
and writing a whole lot of letters. King Louis the
fourteen had offered her some financial support, and so she
wrote a lot of letters to the king to try
to maintain his goodwill even though she had done something
(27:11):
as scandalous as leaving her husband. She also wrote letters
to her sister's husband to try to convince him that
Marie's leaving had been her own decision, not something that
Hortense had forced her or caused her to do. Towards
the end of Hortense's time and Savoy, when she was
twenty nine, she wrote her memoirs. These were published in
(27:33):
sixty under the title Memoir d M L d M
or Memoir de madond ch There was already so much
rumor and gossip about her life and her relationship with
her husband that she just decided to put her own
side of the story out there publicly and in print.
This made her one of the first women in Europe
(27:54):
to publish her own story under her own name and
for a general audience rather than us for her family
and friends. Meanwhile, Marie was trying to evade various messengers
that she knew were carrying orders for her to stop
where she was. It's basically like, if they don't find me,
I don't have to stop. One of them did finally
(28:16):
catch up to her, though, and then she was presented
with a series of proposals that would involve her returning
to her husband. She rejected all of those and said
that she wanted to enter a convent of her choice,
something that she pointed out that thousands of other women
had done after being widowed or otherwise separated from their husbands.
(28:38):
Once she had made her whole position on this clear,
she apparently picked up a guitar and started playing it
as though she had just said all she had to
say about that and moved on. One of the accounts
that I read said that she had kept this guitar
with her the entire time since leaving room, But it
also said that they left without a lot of luggage,
so I'm not sure where the guitar came from, but
(28:59):
I love that story. I liked the idea of the
guitar being her version of La la la La I'm
not listening to. Eventually, Marie was allowed to go to
a convent in Lease, about forty miles outside of Paris,
which is one of the convents Hortense had stayed in previously.
At first, Marie had regular visits from her sister's olymp
(29:21):
and Marianne, and her husband sent some of her servants
with some of her belongings that she had requested, but
Lorenzo had sent one of those servants to act as
a spy, and soon Marie was being allowed visits only
from her sisters. Marie later moved to another convent that
was farther from Paris, but she was even less happy there.
(29:43):
It wasn't as comfortable, and she said that the air
was bad and made her sick. At one point, Marie
arranged a visit to her sister Hortense, but Hortense seems
to have intentionally avoided Marie by going on a trip
to the country instead. I don't think this was just
the case of bad timing. I think it was on purpose.
Hortense may have been worried that if she really welcomed
(30:06):
her sister, she would run afoul of some of the
good graces that at that point we're keeping her relatively safe.
But when Marie later wrote the Hortense asking for her protection,
Hortense and the Duke of Savoy arranged for Marie to
enter a convent and Turin. Marie was just really hoping
to find a place where she would have a little
(30:27):
more comfort and autonomy. But after a really perilous journey
through territory that was caught up in the Franco Dutch
War in the winter, she wound up at a convent
where she had even less freedom than she'd had before.
After Hortense's memoirs were published, Marie got a copy. The
memoirs had been so popular that other people started writing
(30:50):
and publishing fake versions of their own. Some of these
were wildly inaccurate about both sisters, including totally distorted versions
of Marie's experiences. So she followed in her sister's footsteps
and she published her own memoir, The Truth in its
Own Light or The Genuine Memoirs of m Mancini Constables Cologna.
(31:12):
Around this time, Hortense was working on plans to leave Savoy.
She and her staff just kind of weren't getting along
with people anymore as she was trying to make those arrangements. Though,
the Duke died suddenly on June twelfth, seventy five, at
the age of only forty. The Duke's son, Victor Amadeus
(31:34):
the Second, was only nine, so his widow was acting
as regent, but she had really never been a fan
of Hortense. She told Hortense that she was no longer
welcome at the late Duke's court. The Duke's death was
also a blow to Marie because even though she had
not been living in Savoy, I'm not sure if these
two ever even actually met. She had written him really
(31:55):
often and counted him as one of her allies. After
the Duke's death, Hortense started making her way to England,
where she had a cousin, and she got a letter
from Ralph Montague passing on an invitation from Charles the Second.
The Franco Dutch War was still ongoing, so Hortense's journey
was perilous. She arrived on New Year's Eve sixteen seventy five.
(32:18):
Charles the Second, of course, was nicknamed the Merry Monarch.
He was famous for having a whole lot of affairs,
and as we said earlier, he was one of the
people who had offered to marry Hortense Mancini decades before.
She also had a reputation for being very charming and
witty and attractive and popular with men. So there were
(32:38):
fears at court that the King might be a little
bit overly interested in her, and that she might kind
of throw off the balance of his other relationships and
this like house of affairs cards would turn into chaos.
These fears were founded. Soon the King and Horton were
(33:00):
having an affair, and he had granted her at pension
in sixteen seventy six, Hortense Mancini started hosting salons in England,
ones that were open to women and gave them opportunities
to learn and experience art and culture free from many
of the cultural restraints that were normally placed on them.
Her friend Charles des Saint Evermond acted as co host,
(33:23):
and sometimes the two of them are credited with popularizing
champagne in England. Charles imported it from France and they
served at the salon. Hortense also had a lot of pets,
including dogs and cats and parrots and other exotic birds,
and she had gambling tables, which led some people to
write off her salon as a gambling den. Hortense Mancini
(33:45):
had affairs throughout her life away from her husband, and
one of the most notorious was while she was in England.
It was with Anne, Countess of Sussex, who was one
of the King's illegitimate daughters. Although she was only fourteen
and was already married to a man named Thomas Leonard,
who was one of the gentlemen of the King's bed chamber,
(34:07):
Neither Hortense nor Anne seemed upset by rumors that they
were lovers, and they really did not try to contradict them.
One of the people who commented on this was Lady Chaworth,
who wrote this in a letter to her brother, Lord
Ruth on December six quote, Lady Sussex is not yet gone,
but my Lord is better and holds his resolution of
(34:29):
going as soon as the weather breaks up to make
good travailing. She and Madame Mazzarin have privately learned to
fence and went down into St James Park the other
day with drawn swords under their nightgowns, which they drew
out and made several fine passes with to the admiration
of several men that was onlookers in the park. And
another letter she wrote quote Lady Sussex is mightily pleased
(34:53):
with fox hunting and hair hunting, but kisses Madame Mazarin's
picture with much effects and still This might have been
after Ann's husband demanded that she come back from Hortense's lodgings,
and she was forcibly removed from there. Hortense had various
other affairs, including a possible one with past podcast subject
(35:14):
afro Ben. Her relationship with the Count of Monico eventually
became public and close enough that King Charles called off
his affair with her, but he wasn't so upset about
it that he made her go back to France instead.
Hortense kept up an active social life in her house
in St. James's Park, including being reunited with Maurice I
Donni de Carcel when she came to visit London. While
(35:37):
Hortense was having what sounds like a pretty fabulous time
in London, Marie made her way to Madrid and she
moved into another convent. While there, she was reunited with
her sons, who by now were teenagers. Her husband, Lorenzo
kept trying to restrict her movements. He seems to have
kind of allowed her to go to Madrid, thinking that
(36:00):
family members he had there would help keep her in line.
But officials in Madrid seemed less inclined to do what
Lorenzo wanted them to do. The Archbishop of Caesara wrote
him a letter that said, in part quote, here we
do not treat our wives as you do in Italy.
Your wish to put her in a prison is not
(36:20):
enough to see it done. But Lorenzo would not give
up in his efforts to get her to return to
their marriage, or if not that at least to be
able to control her comings and goings. Eventually, he ordered
her imprisonment in a medieval fortress in Seville known as
the Alcazar, something even her detractors thought was too extreme
(36:41):
because this was a cold, drafty place and this was
happening in the middle of winter. In sight one, Lorenzo
proposed that Marie enter the convent as a novice, meaning
that she would be on her way to taking steps
to becoming a nun, rather than just being sheltered in
the convents. He said that he would be taking holy
(37:03):
orders as well. Marie agreed to this, although Lorenzo did
not hold up his end of the bargain to take
holy orders of his own. Meanwhile, back in England, Hortense
had fallen under suspicion in the wake of the Popish plot.
This was not a real plot. It was based on
fabricated allegations by Anglican clergyman Titus Oates that Jesuits were
(37:26):
planning to assassinate Charles the Second. Even though this was
not true, a lot of people believed it, and since
Hortense was Catholic and a foreigner, people began to distrust her. Then,
in sixteen eighty four, her nephew, Philippe, who was her
sister Olimp's son, challenged one of Hortense's admirers to a
duel and killed him. In France, this was a huge scandal,
(37:50):
and people blamed Hortense for not being a better influence
on him. Then, in February of six five, King Charles
the Second died. His successor, James the Second and seventh,
continued to support Hortense financially, but he was deposed in
the Glorious Revolution of sixteen eight. A year later, on
(38:10):
April fifteenth, sixteen eighty nine, Marie's husband, Lorenzo and Afrio
colonnad died, and as a widow, Marie finally had some
of the freedom that she had been trying to get
for herself for most of her life. She reconnected with
her sons and she traveled. She also reconnected with her
old friend or Tensia Stella, who had been one of
(38:32):
her ladies in waiting and who also was one of
the women that Lorenzo had had an affair with. Lorenzo
and or Tensia Stella had two children that Lorenzo had
formally recognized, and these two women each worked to help
the other one out with various issues that were related
to Lorenzo's estate. Well, we kind of both got in
(38:54):
this mess. Possibly inspired by Lorenzo's death, Armand sued Hortense
in sixteen nine during a formal separation hearing. He vilified
her as a gambler and libertine, and the legal arguments
surrounding the hearing were published afterward. The case was decided
(39:14):
in the Duke's favor, and Hortense was ordered to return
to France, first to a convent and then to her husband,
and she said she would rather die. It was not
possible for Armand to force Hortense to return, though it
might have been, except that the Nine Years War had
started the year before, and England and France were at
(39:37):
war with one another. Hortense just defied this order and
stayed where she was, although she had to move into
smaller and smaller lodgings as her money dwindled. By June
of sixte Hortense was described as increasingly depressed, including drinking
too much, not eating enough, and deeply in debt. She
(39:58):
died on July two, six John Evelyn wrote about it
in his diary on the eleventh, describing her as quote
an extraordinary beauty and wit, but dissolute and impatient of
matrimonial restraint. After paying off her debts, Armand had Hortense's
body embalmed and returned to France. He took it through
(40:20):
what seems like an intentionally planned roundabout and very long route,
traveling through places that he knew that she hated to
get there the drama. Marie Mancini's last year seemed to
have been more comfortable and happier than her sister's. She
did not have much of her own, but her sons
(40:41):
were generous with her. She traveled when things like the
Nine Years War weren't making it too dangerous to do so.
She died in Pisa on May eighth, seventeen fifteen, and
she was buried there. She had asked to be buried
wherever it was she happened to be when she died.
Her first love, Louis the fourteen, died a few months later.
(41:01):
There are lots of books about Hortense Mancini and Marie Mancini,
and others of their sisters and the affair of the
poisons that's come up a couple of times. One of
the books that's focused to just on Hortons and Marie
is the King's Mistresses. The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini,
Princess Colowna and her sister, Horton's Duchess Mazarin that came
(41:21):
out in There's also a pretty new translation of their
groundbreaking memoirs which came out in two thousand eight from
the University of Chicago Press. Do you also have listener
mail after this rollicking wild ride? I do. This listener
mail is from Meredith and it actually there's the listener
mail and then also an addendum to the listener mail.
(41:43):
So Meredith wrote, Hey, Holly and Tracy, I'm a longtime
listener of your show and have I think listen to
every episode. I wanted to write and say a few
things about your recent episode on Edward May's Monster. The
first being that, as a hospice nurse practitioner who's married
to a cardiac surgeon, I thought I was tough enough
to eat my lunch while listening to this episode end,
(42:04):
I was not so props on that accomplishment of thoroughly
grossing out a hardened medical feel betteran like myself. Secondly,
the first thing I thought of when listening to May's
description of the monster was, Hey, that's what an aortic
plaque looks like. My husband routinely pulls giant plaques and
or cloths out of people's bodies. I've seen a fair
(42:25):
few pictures of the ones who's gotten to include in
papers and the like. I'm not quite sure if that's
exactly what the Lancet researcher was referring to when she
concluded that it was hardened plasma, as plasma is the
clear part of the blood, and plaques are made up
of fatty deposits found in plasma. But anyway, it does
happen that an aortic plaque loosens from the arterial wall
(42:46):
and travels into the heart, causing sorts of damage and
or death, or could have traveled there after death. I
don't know if an entire aortic plaque could wedge into
a ventricle, but anyway, I thought it was interesting. I
attached a picture from Wikipedia, not one of my husband ones,
and it does look a lot like me description. The
first one was taken from a body post mortem. In
the second is a scan of what's in a person
(43:07):
with a plaques descending a order. Thanks for all your
work on the podcast. I look forward to it every week.
I wrote back, was like, this is so great. I
similarly went down a Google a Google image rabbit hole
with terms like plasma clot and post mortem clot as
I was like trying to figure out what this might
have been, and it was like right after I had
(43:29):
eaten lunch, and I similarly was a little a little
gross dout. I was like, this is not the correct
timing of how I should have ordered my day. So
then I got to follow up from Meredith, who said,
so I talked to my husband and he says the
aortic plaque couldn't end up in the ventricle because if
they loosen, they traveled downstream, not up. However, sometimes the
(43:50):
plaqueforms attached to a calcified aortic valve, which would also
form a similar shape if pulled out with a triangle head.
Should actually have been calcified valve. Still not sure how
they would find it all in the ventricle. Probably depends
on how they opened it, etcetera. If they were just
mistaken that it was all in the ventricle. Anyway, just
(44:11):
making sure I didn't give you bad info. So I
loved this whole email from the pros. Yeah, I don't
know why. I did not foresee that that episode would
prompt people to send in medical images. But this is
not the only email that we got that had images
(44:33):
of like clots and plaques and et cetera attached to it.
So thank you for sending this possibility about something that
may have been going on. We also got an email
from somebody saying that it might have been a thrombus,
which is another word for a blood clot. And I
think the reason that the two people whose papers I
found that were in like the late early one century
(44:56):
about these the reason that I think they didn't just
say it was a blood clot is that it's described
in May's writing as having been white, and most of
the time blood clots are read, I have been told
that they can look quite in some circumstances, but like
that's I think that's what's driving that description. So anyway,
(45:18):
thank you Meredith for this fascinating email and the pictures.
Um And I'm sorry for all of the various people
who are who we grossed out with this episode, because
we did also get some comments about how gross it was.
I feel like I can be squeamish, and none of
that grossed me out, and I'm like, have I become
a monster? The episode itself didn't gross me out, but
(45:39):
the pictures that I looked at when I was in
my Google search, my Google image search rabbit hole, those
did gross me out. None of it was nearly as
gross to me as like, I have a specific, vivid
memory of which which episode has ever been the grossest
to me? And it was the Terror episode. Oh yeah,
that didn't gross me on. Maybe I'm not squeamish as
(46:00):
I thought. I just don't want to watch a facelift.
I'll watch anything else. Yeah, there was one particular moment
in that episode that I I had to read it
and I read it really fast because it was really
grist me out. Anyway, you can go find that episode
yourself if you're curious. It's about the guy named Tara. Anyway,
thanks again for this email. If you would like to
(46:21):
send us a note, We're at History Podcast at I
heart radio dot com. We're all over social media at
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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