Memoirs of Jean François Paul De Gondi, Cardinal De Retz — Complete

Jean François Paul de Gondi was never meant to be a priest. The youngest coadjutor archbishop in French history became one anyway, because the family wanted the income. What they could not control was his appetite for everything the cloth was supposed to forbid: political power, beautiful women, and the intoxicating game of court intrigue. Retz's memoirs trace this magnificent failure across the chaos of the Fronde, when half of France rose up against the young Louis XIV and his minister Mazarin. He writes with startling frankness about his own duplicity, his plots that failed, his desires that embarrassed him, and his strange friendship with the queen mother. This is not the careful self-justification of a statesman. It is the confession of a man who understood his own nature perfectly and could not change it. For anyone who wants to see the birth of modern political autobiography, or who delights in the spectacle of a brilliant mind cataloging its own weaknesses, Retz remains indispensable.