Excerpt from The Seven Richest Heiresses of France UP to the Eighteenth Century Germany and France were the promised lands of those Italians and Swiss, who did not like to stay in their own countries, but preferred to seek a brilliant career at the Courts of foreign kings and princes. The fact was that there were many men, ready to give themselves up, body and soul, for material gain, who left their countries with their hearts filled with hope, and returned home with wealth, titles and orders or, who did not return but induced their poor relations to join them, that they might also become rich and powerful. The purpose of this book is to narrate the extraordinary career of that famous Italian, Mazarin, who came to France poor and relatively unknown, but nevertheless became a Prince of the Church, ruled over the country omnipotently by smiles, flatteries, promises, exibility and personal charms and acquired - for those times - the enor mous wealth of a hundred millions in gold, which he was daring enough to take from the exchequer of the King of France for his own purposes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."