In 1649, an English queen in exile at the French court proposed a startling match: her son, the future King Charles II, should marry a four-year-old Italian girl named Hortense Mancini. The marriage never happened, but it was a sign of how far the Mancini sisters had risen. Daughters of a minor Roman baron and nieces of Cardinal Mazarin, the most powerful man in France, they arrived in Paris in the early 1650s and became known as the Mazarinettes. By the time their story was over, they had been wives, mistresses, and political pawns for the most powerful men in Europe.
Their father, Lorenzo Mancini, belonged to one of Rome’s oldest noble families. Their mother, Girolama Mazzarini, was the sister of Giulio Mazzarini, the future Cardinal Mazarin. After Lorenzo died, Girolama turned to her brother for support. His instruction was simple: leave Rome and try your luck in France, where the marriage of the eldest daughter had already tied the family’s fate to the Bourbon crown.
Laura, the eldest of the five surviving sisters, was born in Rome in 1636. At fifteen, she was married to Louis de Bourbon, Duke of Mercœur, a grandson of King Henry IV and a cousin of King Louis XIV. She bore three sons before dying in 1657 from complications after childbirth. She was twenty years old.
Her sons were raised by their aunts, and one of them later became a Marshal of France. Olympe, born in 1638, was the strategist of the family. Mazarin used her marriage to Prince Eugene Maurice of Savoy in 1657 to build a political dynasty. She was said to be a mistress of Louis XIV and became deeply involved in court intrigue.
In 1679 she was implicated in the notorious Affair of the Poisons, accused of plotting to poison one of the king’s mistresses. Though her life was spared, she was exiled from France and spent her final years in Brussels, dying in 1708 at the age of seventy. Her son, Prince Eugene of Savoy, became one of the greatest military commanders in European history. Marie, born in 1639, was considered the beauty of the family.
Louis XIV genuinely loved her, and there was talk of marriage, but his advisors insisted he marry a foreign princess for reasons of state. It was said the king wept over losing her. To separate them, Marie was hastily married to Lorenzo Colonna, an Italian prince, in 1661. She was never happy in the marriage, which eventually deteriorated, and she spent much of her later life abroad with her sister Hortense.
Both became celebrated memoirists, offering rare insight into how aristocratic women of the early modern era understood their place in the world. Marie died in Italy in 1715. Hortense, born in 1646, was the most admired of the sisters. Her marriage to Armand-Charles de La Porte, Duke of La Meilleraye, one of the richest men in France, was a disaster.
He was unstable, convinced his young wife was unfaithful, and ordered servants to search her apartments at night for imaginary lovers. He destroyed his family’s art collection and allegedly had servants’ teeth pulled to keep them from attracting attention. Hortense fled the marriage in 1668. Louis XIV gave her protection, and she later moved to the English court, where Charles II, having regained his throne, made her one of his mistresses.
She remained in England for the rest of her life, dying in 1699. Her unstable husband reappeared after her death, seized her remains, and paraded them around France in a carriage before burial. Marie Anne, the youngest, was born in 1649 and was said to be the most intelligent of the five. Her marriage to the Duke of Bouillon was one of the few happy ones, and she bore seven children.
Like her sister Olympe, she was caught up in the Affair of the Poisons. She defended herself successfully before the court in 1680 and won public admiration, though she was asked to leave the palace. She spent her remaining years quietly on her country estates. The Mancini sisters had scandalized Europe, but their descendants would do something almost unprecedented: four sisters who all became official mistresses of the same king.
Those women were the de Nesle sisters, and the king was Louis XV. The five de Nesle sisters were born to an aristocratic family with links to the Mancinis through Hortense’s son. Their mother had served as a lady-in-waiting to the queen, and when she died in 1729, her place was inherited by her eldest daughter, Louise Julie. That position placed Louise at the heart of the court at exactly the moment Louis XV began to stray from his queen.
By 1732 she had become his mistress. The king’s chief minister, Cardinal Fleury, encouraged the relationship, preferring a discreet mistress loyal to him over factions gathering around the queen. Louise herself seemed uninterested in political power and enjoyed the wealth and status her position brought. She genuinely loved the king and believed she was securing her family’s future by bringing her sisters to court.
She succeeded too well. By the late 1730s, Louis was sleeping with her younger sisters as well. Pauline, the second sister, was louder and more ambitious. She entered the court, became the king’s mistress, and was given a marriage of convenience to a marquis who went to live in the countryside.
In 1741, after only two years as mistress, she died in childbirth at twenty-nine. What followed was appalling: while her body lay in state at Versailles, the guards left their posts to drink, and an angry mob broke in and mutilated her corpse. Marie Anne, the youngest, was the most ruthless of all. Backed by the powerful Duke of Richelieu, who saw her as a weapon against Cardinal Fleury, she was brought before the king at a lavish ball in 1742.
Within weeks she had displaced her own sister. She insisted Louise’s belongings be removed from her Versailles apartment, a calculated humiliation. Louise retreated to a convent and died there in 1751. Marie Anne quickly became the king’s principal mistress and the center of court intrigue during the War of the Austrian Succession.
She died in December 1744, convinced she had been poisoned. No evidence of murder was ever found, but her death ended Richelieu’s brief ascendancy. After Marie Anne’s death, Louis sought comfort with a fourth sister. Diane, born in 1713, became his mistress in late 1744.
Her reign lasted only three months before she was displaced by a commoner who would become far more famous than any of them: Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, better known as Madame de Pompadour. Dolores retired from court and lived quietly until her death in 1769. The fifth sister, Hortense, was the exception. She never became the king’s mistress.
Married unhappily at twenty-four, she resisted the king’s advances, apparently caught between his desires and her husband’s threats to kill her if she gave in. She outlived her sisters by decades, witnessed the French Revolution, and was arrested and interrogated during the Terror. Her wit reportedly saved her. She died in Paris in 1799, a month after Napoleon Bonaparte came to power.
The world she and her sisters had known was gone forever. The de Nesle sisters set a standard of royal scandal that outlived the monarchy itself. The next dynasty of sisters to seize the public imagination came from very different circumstances. The Mitford sisters were British aristocrats who became notorious in the 1930s for reasons overwhelmingly political.
Six sisters were given nicknames that told the story: the Duchess, the Fascist, the Communist, the Nazi, the Novelist, and the other one. Their father was the eccentric second Baron Redesdale, their mother a liberal who embraced fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. Raised in near isolation and educated erratically at home, the sisters developed sharply opposed worldviews. Nancy, the eldest, became a novelist and a leading figure of the “Bright Young Things” of 1920s London.
Her marriage failed, and her great love was a French officer she met during the Second World War, with whom she settled in France. There she became a respected biographer of eighteenth-century figures. She died in Paris in 1973. Pamela was the quiet sister, happiest in the countryside.
Her marriage to a wealthy atomic physicist attracted attention because of his notorious bisexuality and virulent anti-Semitism. They separated in 1951, and she spent her later years quietly, dying in 1994 after a fall. The middle sisters, Diana and Unity, were the most controversial. Diana married young, left her husband for Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, and married him in 1936 at the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler attending the wedding.
During the war, both were arrested and imprisoned until 1943. They later moved to France, where Diana remained unrepentant until her death in 2003 at ninety-three. Unity was even more extreme. She was drawn to Hitler and Germany, studied in Munich, met the Nazi leader, and became part of his inner circle.
Her virulent anti-Semitism surpassed that of her siblings. When war broke out in September 1939, Hitler advised her to return to Britain. Distraught, she shot herself in the head. She survived but suffered permanent brain damage.
A persistent theory claimed she had borne Hitler’s child, but no evidence supports it. She died in 1948 of meningitis caused by the bullet still lodged in her head. Jessica, the younger sister, rebelled against her family in the opposite direction. She married her second cousin, who had fought alongside the communists in the Spanish Civil War; he was killed in action in 1941.
She later married an American civil rights lawyer, moved to California, and became one of America’s most prominent investigative journalists, exposing abuses in the funeral industry and the prison system. She died in 1996. Deborah, the youngest, married the heir to the Duke of Devonshire and became the public face of Chatsworth House, transforming it into one of England’s most famous historic estates. She died in 2014 at ninety-four, ending the Mitford saga 110 years after Nancy’s birth.
The last group of sisters to scandalize the public were born far from the palaces of Europe. The Gabor sisters were Hungarian Jews who became famous in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, celebrated less for their film roles than for their astonishing number of marriages. Magda, Zsa Zsa, and Eva were born in Budapest between 1915 and 1919 to a family of jewelers and porcelain dealers. The sisters were known for their beauty from a young age.
Zsa Zsa was crowned Miss Hungary in 1936. Eva married a Swedish doctor in 1937 and emigrated to the United States, providing a vital link to America for the rest of the family. When the Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944 and began the systematic murder of its Jews, the family fled, eventually joining Eva in America. In Hollywood, the sisters became stars of the golden age.
Eva had the most substantial career, hosting her own television show in the 1950s. Zsa Zsa became one of the most famous actresses of her generation, appearing in films by directors like John Huston and Orson Welles. Between them, the three sisters married twenty times. Magda married six times, Eva five, and Zsa Zsa nine.
Their marriages ranged from brief flings to one union that lasted more than a decade. Zsa Zsa’s longest marriage came last: in 1986 she married Frederick Prinz von Anhalt, an entrepreneur nearly thirty years her junior, and stayed married to him until her death in 2016 at ninety-nine. The sisters had only one child among them, a daughter born to Zsa Zsa in 1947, who died before her mother.
Eva died first in 1995, Magda in 1997, and Zsa Zsa last in 2016, ending the Gabor dynasty with its most famous member.