A High Church figure and leader of a political faction, an admired preacher as well as a pamphleteer, the controversial cardinal de Retz remains best known in French literary history for his posthumously published Mémoires de Monsieur le Cardinal de Retz (1717). The public was immediately attracted to Retz's account of his life during the Fronde for its historical interest as well as its literary value. The memoirs went through two editions in 1717, five in 1718, and one in 1719; they have since remained among the best known in French literature, have been compared with Saint-Simon's and Chateaubriand's memoirs, and are thought to have influenced Stendhal and Marcel Proust.

Jean-François-Paul de Gondi, coadjutor to the archbishop of Paris and later cardinal de Retz (or Rais, as he chose to spell it), was born on 15 September 1613 into an old Florentine merchant family, naturalized in France since the sixteenth...