At every stage of her journey she was overtaken by messengers bearing letters from Louis, full of love and protestations of unflinching loyalty; and when Louis moved with his Court to Bayonne, the lovers met once more to mingle their tears.  But Louis, ever fickle, was already wavering again.  “If I must marry the Infanta,” he said, “I suppose I must.  But I shall never love any but you.”

Marie now realised that this was to be the end.  In face of a lover so weak, and a fate so inflexible, what could she do but submit?  And it was with a proud but breaking heart that she wrote a few days later to tell Louis that she wished him not to write to her again and that she would not answer his letters.  One June day news came to her that her lover was married and that “he was very much in love with the Infanta”; and even her pride, crushed as it was, could not restrain her from writing to her sister, Hortense, “Say everything you can that is horrid about him.  Point out all his faults to me, that I may find relief for my aching heart.”  When, a few months later, Marie saw the King again, he received her almost as a stranger, and had the bad taste to sing the praises of his Queen.

But Marie Mancini was the last girl in all France to wed herself long to grief or an outraged vanity.  There were other lovers by the score among whom she could pick and choose.  She was more lovely now than when the recreant Louis first succumbed to her charms—­with a ripened witchery of black eyes, red lips, the flash of pearly teeth revealed by every dazzling smile, with glorious black hair, the grace of a fawn, and a “voluptuous fascination” which no man could resist.

Prince Charles of Lorraine was her veriest slave, but Mazarin would have none of him.  Prince Colonna, Grand Constable of Naples, was more fortunate when he in turn came a-wooing.  He bore the proudest name in Italy, and he had wealth, good-looks, and high connections to lend a glamour to his birth.  The Cardinal smiled on his suit, and Marie, since she had no heart to give, willingly gave her hand.

Louis himself graced the wedding with his presence; and we are told, as the white-faced bride “said the ‘yes’ which was to bind her to a stranger, her eyes, with an indescribable expression, sought those of the King, who turned pale as he met them.”

Over the rest of Marie Mancini’s chequered life we must hasten.  After a few years of wedded life with her Italian Prince, “Colonna’s early passion for his beautiful wife was succeeded by a distaste amounting to hatred.  He disgusted her with his amours; and when she ventured to protest against his infidelity, he tried to poison her.”  This crowning outrage determined Marie to fly, and, in company with her sister, Hortense, who had fled to her from the brutality of her own husband, she made her escape one dark night to Civita Vecchia, where a boat was awaiting the runaways.

Hotly pursued on land and sea, narrowly escaping shipwreck, braving hardships, hunger, and hourly danger of capture, the fugitives at last reached Marseilles where Marie (Hortense now seeking a refuge in Savoy) began those years of wandering and adventure, the story of which outstrips fiction.