Volume 6, Number 7 · April 28, 1966
All For Love
By Nancy Mitford
The Uncompromising Heart: A Life of Marie Mancini
by Françoise Mallet-Joris, translated by Patrick O'Brien
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 274 pp., $5.50
In the old Europe of the Kings, a man could rise from a humble station to all power, short of royalty, and govern a country which was not even his native land. Such was the career of Cardinal Mazarin. He was not a laborer's son, like Alberoni, or a butcher's son, like Wolsey; he belonged to what would now be called the lower middle class—his mother was a distant relation of the powerful Colonna family and his father, who came of Sicilian peasant stock, was employed by Prince Colonna in a clerical capacity. Young Mazarin, a brilliant boy, took minor orders in the Church, accompanied a Papal legate to France, and in due course was himself appointed Nuncio. Then he became the right-hand man of Cardinal Richelieu. At a court where nobody could drive with the King unless he could prove his seize quartiers of nobility, Mazarin was the closest friend (probably the lover, possibly the husband) of the Queen Mother; after the death of Richelieu he was all powerful in France. He saw the little boy, Louis XIV, through turbulent times, taught him the love of pictures and the art of statesmanship, and tactfully died when the King was beginning to think he would like to rule on his own. Mazarin left priceless books and pictures, a palace which is now the Bibliothèque Nationale, a settled realm, and his nieces.
Review, 1858 words
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