She refused to mend her ways. Hearing that she was ill, Cosimo went to see her at Poggio a Caiano, whither she had been taken from Lappeggi; but she picked up a bottle from her bedside table, threatening to break his head with it unless he left her alone. On her recovery she resumed her practice of walking very fast up the mountain paths behind the villa, taking pot shots at birds on the way and leaving her exhausted attendants trailing far behind her.
Suddenly in October 1665, bored with her monotonous, secluded country life, she presented herself at the Pitti Palace requesting the Grand Duke’s permission to return to Court. Ferdinando quickly assured her that he would like nothing better. Cosimo kissed her. Everyone seemed delighted to welcome her back since she was evidently quite prepared to behave more circumspectly. And, for a time, all went welclass="underline" she was gracious; she was pretty; she danced; she laughed; she made love with Cosimo; and she became pregnant again. Then the troubles began once more. She refused to stop galloping about on her horse; she continued to walk as far and as fast as ever; she resumed her complaints that the Medici were robbing her of her freedom, holding her a prisoner. Despite her violent exercise and an attack of influenza, for which her physicians bled her profusely, she gave birth to a healthy daughter, Anna Maria Luisa, on 11 August 1667. But after that, the abscess on her breast broke out again and she contracted smallpox. As a cure, the doctors not only bled her drastically, but also cut off her hair. In her misery and pain, she railed against Cosimo more virulently than ever. The Grand Duke thought it advisable to send him abroad for a time, first to Germany and the Netherlands and then, since Marguerite-Louise remained unappeasable on his return, to Spain and England.
XXIII
COSIMO III AND THE GRAND PRINCE FERDINANDO
‘Eighteen years is enough. It will serve out my time’
COSIMO, AT twenty-six, was just as gloomy as ever but far more self-confident than at the time of his wedding. An inveterate trencherman, he was now excessively fat; but he had a certain charm of manner, and though he was unduly fond of pious interjections, his conversation was wide-ranging and not uninteresting. In England, where he was well received in academic circles owing to his family’s protection of Galileo, he was seen coming out of the Queen’s Chapel by Pepys who described him as a ‘comely, black, fat man, in a morning suit… a very jolly and good comely man’. At the French Court he created a similarly favourable impression. The King wrote to Marguerite-Louise, ‘Consideration for you alone would have obliged me to give my cousin all the favourable treatment he has received from me. But from what I perceived of his personal qualities, I could not have refused them to his peculiar merit.’ In the less reliable words of Mademoiselle, ‘He spoke admirably on every topic. His physique was rather plump for a man of his age. He had a fine head, black and curly hair, a large red mouth, good teeth, a healthy ruddy complexion, abundance of wit, and was agreeable in conversation.’
Cosimo returned to Florence much taken with the countries of the north. ‘I hope for nothing in this world so ardently as once again to see [that] paradise called England,’ he said soon after his return. ‘I long to embrace again all my old friends there.’ He was equally enthusiastic about France, and evidently prepared to make more allowances for the wayward behaviour of his French wife who, he was pleased to note when he got home, was now on good terms both with his mother and his father. His father, however, was failing fast with dropsy and apoplexy, and suffering agonies from the treatment of his doctors; towards the end, not content with bleeding him, they placed a cauterizing iron on his head and forced polvere capitale up his nose; they also applied to his forehead four live pigeons whose stomachs had been ripped open for the purpose. The Grand Duke Ferdinando II died on 27 May 1670 and was buried with his father and grandfather in the great baroque mausoleum at San Lorenzo.
Cosimo III entered upon his inheritance with the deepest apprehension. In spite of his father’s personal economy and his rigid and extensive system of taxation, there had been no recent improvement in the finances of Tuscany whose trade was rapidly declining and whose population was being constantly decreased by malaria, plague and food shortages due to a backward agriculture. At first, Cosimo endeavoured to deal effectively with the problems that beset him; but soon, recognizing that they were utterly beyond his ability to control, he withdrew more and more into the soothing darkness of his chapel, leaving his mother and her friends to deal with most affairs of state and even deputing his brother, who was not yet twelve, to receive foreign ambassadors. This pleased his bossy mother well enough, but it certainly did not please his wife who angrily complained about a mere della Rovere presuming to take precedence over a daughter of the royal house of France.
In the summer of 1671, after Marguerite-Louise had given birth to a second son, christened Gian Gastone after his grandfather, Gaston d’Orléans, relations between Cosimo and his wife deteriorated rapidly. Believing that she had cancer of the breast she asked Louis XIV to send her a French doctor. Louis agreed to do so; but when the doctor arrived, he discovered that the little bump on her bosom was ‘nowise malignant’. However, sympathizing with her urgent desire to return to France, he did suggest to the Grand Duke that her general health might be improved by taking the medicinal waters at Sainte-Reine in Burgundy. Cosimo took leave to disagree, and naturally his objections led to heated protests from his wife. There were further quarrels over the quality of various jewels he gave her, over her extravagance, over her servants, and particularly over a male cook with whom she behaved outrageously in order to punish Cosimo for having dismissed two German grooms and a French dancing-master. ‘Now this cook,’ so it was recorded,
either dreaded, or pretended to dread, being tickled, and the Duchess, aware of his weakness, delighted in tickling him… He defended himself, shouting and running from one side of the room to the other, which made her laugh excessively.
When tired of this she would beat the cook over the head with a pillow, and the cook would take shelter under her bed where she went on beating him until, tired out with her exertions, she sank into a chair. As she did so her band of musicians started once more to play the tune they had abandoned when the romp had begun. One night the cook, being very drunk, made so much noise while the Grand Duchess was belabouring him with her pillow that he aroused the Grand Duke who, coming down to see what was happening, ‘instantly condemned the cook to the galleys’ – though he later reprieved him. Eventually the Grand Duchess decided to settle the matter once and for all. She wrote to inform Cosimo that she could bear her situation not a moment longer: