Marie Mancini Writing for Her Life

If Marie Mancini, niece of Louis XIV's chief minister Cardinal Mazarin, has come down through the ages, it has been because of her youthful love affair with the king and the scandal she caused later. She and her sister Hortense fled their marriages and travelled together and separately – but unaccompanied by the train their station demanded and unauthorised by their husbands – across western Europe. They sought merely an independent existence. Marie Mancini was a reader, writer, and précieuse, but her surviving writings were produced in service of her real-life circumstances. This article explores Marie's tactics in pursuit of autonomy. It examines her delicate position as she sought to argue her case; it maps the strategy of her published memoir and describes the particularity of her authorial voice; and it takes the measure of her success in staking a claim, both in her own time and in ours.