Duchesse

Raised in a secluded countryside household, Marie de Vignerot was sixteen when her family arranged her marriage to a soldier she hardly knew. Widowed at eighteen, she was drawn into the dangerous, intrigue-filled circles of the French court and Paris high society, where she became the trusted and highly visible aide of her uncle, Cardinal Richelieu, the most powerful man in French government. As he lay dying, he broke with custom by leaving his immense fortune to her, ahead of his male heirs.

As the Duchesse d'Aiguillon, she was unusually independent and shaped French political, religious and cultural life in ways whose effects reached across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Churchmen, statesmen, bankers, writers, artists and men who would later be declared saints all respected, loved or feared her, and many built their careers and lasting reputations with her patronage and organizational energy. Pope Alexander VII and Louis XIV, known as the Sun King, both deferred to her.

Intelligent, accomplished and at times ruthless, she ranks among the most significant French leaders of the seventeenth century, yet modern memory has largely lost her. This book is the first fully researched modern biography of her, placing her at the center of the histories of France and of a Catholic Church expanding across the globe. It follows her through scandalous accusations and intrigue as she championed the people and causes she cared about, her dealings with Marie de Médici, and her role in French imperial ambitions and the Fronde civil war. Adventure, art and politics run throughout, and the book establishes her as a figure without whom France's Golden Age cannot be fully understood.