Delorme, MARION

Delorme, MARION, a famous Frenchwoman, whose name figures too prominently in the history of the 17th century. She was born 3d October 1613, in or near the town of Blois, and came at an early period of her life to Paris, where her great beauty and brilliant wit soon gathered a group of wealthy and high-born lovers round her. Even the great Cardinal Richelieu was not insensible to her charms, and revenged himself for her contempt by causing her to be separated from the ill-fated young Cinq-Mars, her love for whom was the one ennobling passion of her life. Among her lovers were, in succession, the Duke of Buckingham, Saint-Evremond, the Duc de Brissac, the Chevalier de Grammont, and Emeri, the Superintendent of Finance. During the first disturbances of the Frondeurs, her house was the rallying-point of the chiefs of that party, and in consequence Mazarin was about to fling her into prison, when she suddenly died in 1650. A curious tradition sprang up in France during the next century, to the effect that Marion had not died, but escaped to London; that she had married an English lord, had then returned to Paris, and married first a robber-chief, next a procurator of finance, and, finally, that she died in 1706; or, according to another account, even so late as 1741. Her story was treated by Victor Hugo in a drama; by Alfred de Vigny in his romance Cinq Mars. See Eugène de Mirecourt's imaginative Confessions de Marion Delorme (3 vols. 1851).