Source:
Christina of Sweden, pages 63 to 66, by Ada Harrison, 1929
The biography:
A somewhat wretched period followed for Christina at Rome. She returned worse off than ever, and stained with the Monaldeschi murder. The Pope did not receive her. He said now openly that she was a barbarian, with barbarian ideas, and made no secret of his desire that she should give up residence at Rome. She had put herself hopelessly in the wrong in his eyes, and her refusal to use any smoothness aggravated her offences. Her life at Rome, it was now clear to him, was an essay in time-honoured pursuit of both having her cake and eating it. She did not want the weariness of being a sovereign, but, declaring that Rome was everybody's territory, she wanted to behave there like the most swashbuckling sovereign in the world. She wanted to keep a great household of troops, to be admitted everywhere when and how she pleased, to exact acknowledgement from everybody with whom she came in contact, and all the while to criticise Roman behaviour by her northern standards with a truly royal scorn and freedom.
When at last Alexander received her, he tried to impose terms. He demanded that the queen should leave the Palazzo Mazarin where she was now living, and give up Santinelli. Christina was infuriated at this intrusion into her private affairs. She treated the Pope with contempt. 'When your Holiness accorded a grace', she wrote on one occasion, 'I thought to be able to count on it. I am now disabused. To promise and to keep a promise are two things irreconcilable at the court of Rome.'
Relations between the two might have been permanently strained, if it had not been for the intervention of Azzolino. By this year, 1659, Azzolino, the greatest figure in the queen's horizon, was near to that ascendancy over her which he held for the rest of her life.
Decio Azzolino, Christina's only master, was after all not a soldier, but a priest. He was of a provincial noble family, from Fermo, and a cardinal. He was three years Christina's senior, and half their lives were passed in close relationship. Azzolino is not a great figure to posterity. He had not one mighty attribute through which to leave his mark. But he was the kind of man who impresses himself strongly on the society of his day. He was clever, cultured and good-looking. Above all he had charm, the gift that often in his lifetime takes a man further than either strength or virtue, but fades after his death. Relations with Christina, from his side, never amounted to love, but they were everything short of that. Christina[,] on her side, gave more, depended more, felt more. They were, most likely, lovers; but their intimacy, if it was fed at times by passion, existed on other foods. There was something peculiarly Roman in their relationship. Then, as now, those inside Rome felt it to be *Caput Mundi*, the centre not only of the religious[,] but of the temporal and artistic world. The city was full, then as now, of art and culture, which, if not the most vigorous, were at least the most exquisite and superior, and it was, as well, filled to its narrow limits with diplomacy and politics. Azzolino was deeply involved in all these aspects of Roman life. Christina, like so many a foreign resident caught in the Roman net, had a more than native passion for Roman affairs. From these exterior things their friendship drew sustenance, and did not feed upon itself. Thus, floating on with the life of the city[,] it could last for thirty years. Only when separated from it all did Christina cry out on a deeply personal note, which might never have been wrung from her except in loneliness and isolation. Azzolino, at the heart of things, his thoughts pleasantly parcelled out among them, felt no desire to respond.
The earliest and longest-lived of Azzolino's occupations in relation to Christina, was the attempt to introduce a little order into her dishevelled affairs. In matters of business he was her exact opposite, careful and methodical where she was impatient and lavish. He attempted now to lay out to better advantage the pension which she had from the Pope, and agreed with her that she should go to Sweden to straighten out her affairs there. She had intended to go home before, but had got no further than Paris. Now, however, the shoe of poverty was beginning to pinch in earnest; also, Charles Gustavus had just died, and with the new accession Christina felt her Swedish pension becoming more than ever precarious. She took Azzolino's advice and started north, having previously, at his instance, given up Francesco Santinelli, to whom she had wildly clung, and formally renounced her scheme for invading Naples. Her parting with Santinelli was preceded by a passage characteristic of them both.
Soon after his return from Fontainebleau, Santinelli, with the boundless effrontery of his type, aspired to the hand of the young widow Donna Maria Aldobrandini, a niece of no less a person than the Pope. The ridiculousness of the match was self-evident, but the Pope had taken the trouble to pronounce against it. Where angels might have feared to tread, Christina rushed in to champion the lovers. Donna Maria was incarcerated in a convent, and Azzolino seized the opportunity to persuade Christina to get rid of one of the prime inducements to her most infatuated follies. Now for Monaldeschi, the Santinellis, Naples and a hopeless insolvency, were substituted Azzolino, a scheme for redeeming the Near East from the Turk, and a hopeful insolvency. Christina, under Azzolino's guidance, began, instead of pawning her jewels, to toil away at her debts. Though she spent a prodigious quantity of time and paper on them, it must be confessed that she never abolished them, the bankrupt state being part of her nature; but what was truly her own business was no doubt a better outlet for her surplus energy than her furious participation in other people's affairs.
Above: Kristina.
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