Richelieu

This short biography of the dreaded red eminence, by the Anglo-French writer and educator, Gustave Masson, combines French wit and English clarity. We see Richelieu as he really was, a gifted and relentless champion of the rising French state and a besotted author of terrible plays. This is a panoramic survey of France in the time of Louis XIII--her overweening aristocrats, her writers great and small, her grand ladies, and her terrible injustices, as when the hapless priest, Urbain Grandier, is