In person Louis resembled his father. He was dark, broad shouldered, and rather short, with regular features and a prominent nose. But he had all the fire of his mother's Spanish eyes, and withal the grandest manners and the most royal presence ever seen. From a boy he was an ardent admirer of the fair. All his life he continued to be secretly ruled by female influence. Indeed, his long reign may be divided into three periods, corresponding with the characteristics of the three women who successively possessed all the love he could spare from himself. He was gentle, humane, and domestic with La Vallière; arrogant, heartless, and warlike with De Montespan; selfish, bigoted, and cruel, with De Maintenon.
His boyish philandering with the handsome nieces of Cardinal Mazarin has been already noticed. What subtle plans developed themselves in the brain of that unscrupulous schemer never can be known; but he could not have arranged matters better to place one of his nieces on the throne of France. Nor to his Italian notions would this have been extraordinary. Mazarin would have argued that a Mancini was as well born as a Medici, whose arms were a pill, and that Martinozzi was as ancient a name as Bourbon.
Anne of Austria looked on with displeasure. Mazarin wore an imperturbable front, a sphinx-look, ready to answer either way, as circumstances might prompt. By the time that Maria Mancini came from Rome, Louis's passions were thoroughly roused. The young lion had tasted blood, and found it pleasant to his palate. Maria was far less beautiful than her sisters,—indeed, that bitter-tongued chronicler, Bussy Rabutin, calls her "ugly, fat, and short, with the air of a soubrette"; but she had the temper of an angel, and seemed to the boyish Louis a soft, plaintive, clinging creature, who appealed to his pity. In reality she had a force of character ten times greater than his own, and the courage of a heroine.
In Maria Mancini, Mazarin made his great move in the matrimonial game. Louis gave signs of a serious attachment. Anne of Austria set a watch upon him. It was needful. Louis had a temperament of fire, Maria was born under an Italian sky. Notwithstanding the watch set Louis found opportunity to promise marriage to Maria. He repeated this promise with protestations and oaths, but, cautious even in his youth, he did not, like his grandfather Henry IV., commit it to writing.
Mazarin, informed by his niece of what had passed, opined that the time to speak had come. He ventured to sound the Queen-mother. He spoke of the charms of genuine attachment, the happiness of domestic life on a throne; he hinted at the Queen's own unhappy career, sacrificed as she had been to a political alliance. He enlarged on the antiquity of the Latin races, specially those of Rome and Sicily, "all of them," he said, "once reigning houses, and poverty," he added, "did not make blue blood red."
The Queen, however subservient to the Cardinal on all other matters, flared out—"If ever my son condescends to marry your niece," cried she, "I will disown him. I will place myself, with his brother, Philip of Orleans, at the head of the nation, and fight against him and you, Cardinal Mazarin."
The Cardinal had many consolations; he was fain to yield. Maria was sent to a convent. Poor Maria—to go to Brouage instead of sitting on a throne! It was very hard. Louis was in despair. When they met to say adieu, he wept.
"What, Sire!" she exclaimed; "you love me—you weep—and we part?" and she turned her liquid eyes upon him with a look of passionate entreaty.
Perhaps the tears in the King's eyes blinded him, or he did not hear her; at all events, he heeded neither her look nor her innuendo, and she went.
Then those marriage bells sounded from over the frontier of which we have spoken. The King espoused the Infanta of Spain, and Maria Mancini became La Principessa Colonna, and lived at Naples.