To such a man the dazzling beauty of his wife was a perpetual torment. It filled him at once with a horrible jealousy and a fear for the safety of her soul. She seemed to him the incarnation of temptation. He dared not let her out of his sight, and subjected her to an espionage as base as it was intolerable. To retain the servants she liked she was obliged to pretend she hated them; if she wished to go into society or to the play her husband preached her a sermon on the evil of the latter, and objected to the toilette a woman of rank and fashion was obliged to wear at the former. The innocent "patch," then the rage, was the cause of many a quarrel between this ill-matched pair.
"Ah," said people on rare occasions when they appeared in public together, "the Duc and Duchesse de Mazarin have 'patched' up their differences again."
For seven years their private life was the _pièce de résistance_ at every feast of scandal served at Paris and Versailles. But, as if this asphyxiating atmosphere of suspicion and religious prudery that the Duc de Mazarin forced his lovely wife to breathe was not sufficient penance for her charms, he dragged her about with him from province to province in all sorts of weather and seasons, compelling her to sleep in peasants' huts and sheds, or lodge for weeks in lonely castles. Once even she was forced to accompany him two hundred leagues when she was _enceinte_.
To this vindictive religious mania he was afflicted with another for law-suits. He was said to have had more than three hundred, nearly all of which he lost.
At the end of seven years the Duchesse de Mazarin, who had borne her husband three daughters and one son, in spite of her own disregard of the value of money, became alarmed at the rapidity with which her uncle's millions were being squandered on the crowd of becowled hangers-on who directed the life and conscience of their cranky dupe. She protested on behalf of her children. The Duc de Mazarin answered by seizing her jewels, on the ground that jewels encouraged vanity and immodesty, and ordered her to accompany him to Alsace, of which province he was governor, intending to keep her with him there for the rest of her life. After a scandalous attempt at force, witnessed by the entire domestic establishment of the Palais Mazarin, the Duchesse escaped to her brother's, the Duc de Nevers.