Behind the Scenes Minis: Mancinis and Tragedy

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday and Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This week we talked about Hortense and Marie Mancini Love. So this this episode went through a process of what is the episode about? Because what I originally started out with was just Hortense specifically, uh, And then I was like, maybe it needs to be an episode on all of the Mazarinettes. And then I was like, that is way too much. But then as I was taking all of these notes about Hortense, Marie just kept coming up over and over and over, and I was like, I think I just need to have the episode be about both of them because their lives were intertwined so much, and they did intersect with each other and so many ways, um, and at different times of their life, one of them often seems to have like the slightly better end of the stick, like but it shifts, it shifts back and forth. Yeah. Um. I also originally had in some notes about like there effects on people's attitudes toward divorce, because like this was not something that women generally did, and they're like, while there was a legal option to have this, like separation in France specifically like it, it wasn't something that was really widely available, but divorce continued to be illegal for like another almost century after they lived in France. In England, I think you had to have an Act of Parliament to get divorced. Like divorce just wasn't something that wasn't an available legal, no remedy to a lot of people in Europe, and continued not to be even though even after they had broken all this new ground and published their memoirs and become famous almost like today's social media Darling's um We like their effect on on people's abilities to get out of marriages that were really abusive or terrible like that continued to be really limited. It's interesting because you know, we talked in this episode about the affair of the poisons and how many people were accused of poisoning and how much poisoning was going on. We did, like our whole first season of Criminalia was about women poisoners, and I'm like, did nobody just slip these gals some arsenic They could have gotten out of those? Maybe her their sisters could have, because two of their sisters they got banished. Yeah, yeah, so I kept thinking about that throughout. I'm like, I know, I know who you could have contacted, Like they're going to call me, give them a historical hook up. It's another one of our very bad uses for time machines, right, I can I can tell you who can get you out of this marriage. That's terrible. Don't do that. Um. Yeah. I love their story so much because it is so mind blowing. The thing that always strikes me is one when you look at their story, how much this this dovetails on what you were saying about divorced not being an option. How much women were kind of viewed as an asset and not people. Right. Even their uncle, who in many ways seemed to treat them very well, still was using them as tools of his own um legacy and desires. And you know, they were like they were part of a financial transaction, which is just like and then the other thing that I think about a lot, you know, Hortense being the younger of the two. You know, we're talking about her having kids and leaving her kids and running around and I'm I guarantee to many people's ears, it's like, what what kind of mother would do that? Dude. By the time they're late in the game, like sixeventy one, when they are running away together, she was still only she was so young. And I know that, you know, maturity ages were slightly different than but that's still very very young to have lived the life she had to, for both of them, to have never really had a life of their own. And then be like, and you're responsible for all of this. Oh, you're not a human, but you are absolutely responsible for other humans. It's just a lot I have. I can't help but have sympathy for them, even in their moments of their worst behavior. I So I don't think Hortense ever saw her children after leaving. I could be wrong. It's like if she did, that's not one of the things that stuck in my brain while doing research. Um, but it it also does seem like when she left, she thought if she could find somebody who was sympathetic to her and could help her make a case, that maybe she would be able to better advocate for them, like not in the house with her husband. Um, And like I like that. I can totally see it, Like she's in this marriage with this person who just is terrifying to me and whose behavior is really erratic and controlling. Um, I can totally see her being like I, I cannot I cannot fix this here. I don't have the means to take them with me, So maybe if I go somewhere else, somebody can help me. Like a lot, I can sort of see that pross thought press us. But then like later I'm a little fuzzier on like now I'm a party girl and now what happened? Yeah, but you know, both of them, it was clear that they felt like and we're expected to have a male heir for their husband. Um, and that uh, that hortense once she once she had a boy after having had daughters, was like done finished with this? Yeah? I also, um, armand what a case of projection? Right, you can't turn butter. People will think it's sexy. People will think it's sexy, or you think it's sexy. Right, this is your issue. I'm trying to actually make food, like I didn't. Um, he had a lot of issues. It's the most gentle way I can put it. Yeah, it sort of makes you wonder about whether Cardinal Mazarin was that good of a judge of character, right. Well, and it also becomes that that question that you know, they all layer like an onion of like maybe he was absolutely wonderful and seemed completely together around men, but around women he became a complete nutbag, just like obsessive and bizarre and fixated on their every move being somehow gonna lure men to dangerous thoughts. Yeah, Armand I wish there were therapists century France for you. I know that's not the cure for everything, but holy Moses, yoursel. Yeah, it's really had problems. So yeah, I find all of their stories really fascinating, and trying to write about all seven of those nieces would have been way too many, so you have done any of them justice. But I think Marian Hortense together, yes hopefully worked out. I will forever think about um no uns in a convent dipping their fingers in holy water before the Sign of the Cross and getting ink all over their habit to think about that all the time, because I think that's funny. I know it's sacrilegious, I just think it's funny. Yeah, it really seemed almost like I don't know that the accounts of um of Hortense and uh Marie Sudny like it reminds me not even of my brother's summer camp experiences and the boy Scouts, but like a comedy fix a fictional comedy of like boys and boy Scouts, uh doing pranks, doing pranks on people like it. Just um, I know there's a gendered element to all of that, but like that's what it kind of reminded me of when it was all the various types of pranks that they did on the nuns. See what it were minded me of is I think a lot of people have those one or two friends where you're just like there is a chemical reaction that happens when the two of you were together and you just behave badly. I have a handful of them. It's like I have friends when Brian and I are like traveling and meeting people in other sit meeting up with our friends and other cities or whatever. I'm like if so and so is coming to dinner and Brian just gets that look like, well, I'm not gonna drink so that I can keep on top of everything, and also like this could go off the rails in anybody. Yeah, there are a few of those in my life. We have great fun together. Yeah, no jail time so far. So Yeah, their whole story is a whole wild pride. Yes. This week we talked about the Coconut Grove fire uh, and I thought I would elaborate on why I find the fires so difficult, because I know that is a thing that I have said on the show before. Um. I know there are a whole podcasts whose whole thing is disasters, and people who listen to disaster podcasts and like they just that's the thing that personally interested in They like it, love it. I find a lot of the disasters difficult. I find the fires specifically difficult because so so so often, so often we're talking about people who were just trying to go to work or go to a play or have dinner or whatever, and the person who was in charge of this business and had a responsibility for the safety of their patrons instead decided that they wanted to make some extra money, or that they wanted to cut corners and have a cheaper building process for their building or whatever, uh, and didn't take the necessary steps to make the building safe and maybe even locked the doors. Or you know, when we're talking about things like the Triangle shirt waste factory, people who were just trying to go to work, and had the doors locked behind them so they couldn't get out. There's just, over and over and over and over, some either greedy or incompetent, or maybe both person making decisions that made a building they were responsible for unsafe, and then a whole lot of people who were just trying to go about their lives dying because of it. Over and over. We've talked about so many fires that have so many common elements uh with them. Plus they're just so deadly and so terrifying. They happened so quickly. I don't want to throw any venues under the bus. Um, but prior to the pandemic, I had season tickets to a particular areas of performances at a particular venue um and our tickets were in the mezzanine, And every single time the show would be over and we would be joining this incredibly slow shuffle of people down the steps to the main floor and out this one exit. I would be like, are there other exits from this building? Because what if there is a fire, Like it is taking us so long just to get out of the building in an orderly way after the show is over. I cannot imagine if everyone were panicked in a fire situation. Yeah, I mean I think we've all been in places like that where you're like, this is a little scary. Do you know what? I thought about a lot? Uh, not to not to laugh about it, but it was just it. It made me chuckle in that I was like, I just talked about this some behind the scenes. Do you remember when we were talking about what a lazy science fair person I was and how I did, Like my best one was on how different fabrics burn. I know a lot about what happens to satin when it burns, and I want to also be very clear in case anybody doesn't know because to to Layman, and I'm not dogging anybody for not knowing this. If you're not a textiles person, you might not know. Satin and silk get used interchangeably. Those are not the same thing at all. Silk refers to the fiber, which is a natural fiber made of course by silkworms. Satin is a weave that gives you that satiny, smooth texture. But you can have a satin made out of all kinds of things. And it really jumped out at me when reading this, because I am a textile dorc that synthetic textile started to be made in the nineteen thirties and they burned very differently, and they burned very differently then, but like um, like I think nylon was and then just early in the year before this, DuPont had started making polyester and another company I think UM but like satin from like the forties. Because I have played with fire on some of that turns into lava. So if it was on the ceiling and it was burning, in addition to its spreading in that little air pocket, it would also have potentially been dropping onto people and things below and catching fire. So that's what I was thinking of. It's like, oh my gosh, red hot fabric lava on everybody, like there's and it's sticky. So it's like when you if you've ever made candy and you get it really really hot, and you know, it's very dangerous at that point because you can burn really easily because it sticks to you and you can't just get it off. It's like that, yeah, yeah, that's what makes that super terrifying. Yeah, one of the things that's really contradictory. And there are several books about about this fire and they all sort of take a different, slightly different approach and focus to it. Um, Like there's some contradictions in terms of what materials were used in the decor and how much Wellanski knew about what they were made of. Apparently, when that fire inspector um came and declared that the building was safe, one of the things that he had done was like held a match to a piece of like the papery artificial palm tree leaf, and it didn't burn, but in court, a much bigger piece of it burned almost like flash paper. So there was a lot of stuff of like there there were not as many standards about how do we test for whether something is fire resistant, because if you know, if somebody held a match up to a thing, it might be fine, but if you were in a space that was as hot as a room on fire, it might suddenly become something that could flash up. And so a lot of those details I did not get into as deeply just because like there was so much, so much that's still not known. That I watched a lecture about this. One of the points that they made was if this were a fire that happened today with today's technologies for like uh an analyzing things that have been burned. Uh, it would probably be a lot clearer exactly how the fire started and exactly how exactly why it burned as fast as as it did. Um with the caveat that, there are four sure fire investigation techniques that have been used within the last few decades that like, as people study them further, don't actually hold up as being a conclusive way to bread point the starting point of a fire and how it's bread. But yeah, fires are are terrifying and uh and just they may it makes me angry how often it's the same story of somebody didn't want to pay for something, or they didn't want people to be able to leave without paying or whatever, um or just didn't pray or tie safety right. In some cases, they're not thinking even nefariously. They're just being sloppy and thoughtless, which is something you can't really afford to do when you are a space that is open to the public. Yeah, so definitely did a lot to revolutionize burn care, and of course burn care has been further revised since the nineteen forties. We were not saying that like they solved burn care. That's not the case. But they did make a lot of advancements um, through treating those people, which still something like half the people that made it to the hospital still died very soon after. It was just getting to the hospital did not necessarily mean somebody was gonna able to survive. So we are recording this more than a month before the actual anniversary. Um and so I am curious to see what kinds of memorials and things happened around Boston, because I know there were some for the seventy five anniversary. I don't know as much from before that because I am a more recent transplant to the area. Dare I opened the Pandora's box as someone who lives in Boston. Of your thoughts on the condom memorial scandal, Oh well, I only know about this scandal what I read about it because for somehow I absolutely missed it a hundred percent when it was happening. Um Like, I did not see anything about it in the news at all as it happened in I think that was I was not lit like. I have never lived like in the city of Boston proper. I've always lived outside of it since moving up here. Um and so like, I didn't see any news coverage, any tweets about it, any whatever. Um. But when I was researchinging the podcast, like I was finding you know, video clips of the news report about the thing and newspaper articles about it. Not living in the neighborhood, it's it's tough to get a gauge on what people really thought about it. But this quote from the condo owners really comes across to me as like thoughtless and inordinately privileged. Yeah, Like the one part where I'm like, Okay, I get that, is like we don't want like, look you lose. Yeah. If they had offered an alternative, like what if we designate this part of this property and as long as people can keep you know, their reth offerings or whatever in that space so that like our kids aren't suddenly dealing with strangers they don't know and having that you know, confusion about who they trusted who they don't, I would feel a little less like, really, are you that thoughtless? But they did an offer anything like that other than not here. Yeah, And it was sort of moved to a corner. It did not move far down the street. It moved to a corner that's kind of on the back side of the hotel that's there. And like then there were people who were trying to kind of well actually exactly where the revolving door really would have been. It became sort of became a whole thing, right, Yeah, it's that quote that we read I found so again, Happy Friday. I hope whatever is coming up on your weekend is is RESTful and pleasant. Um. We'll be back with a Saturday Classic on Saturday. We'll be back Monday with a brand new episode. If you haven't, you can subscribe to our show on iHeart radio app or wherever else you like to get your podcast. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H