Cardinal Mazarin: A Character Analysis

Overview

Cardinal Jules Mazarin stands at the center of Between Two Kings as both the novel's most powerful figure and its most conspicuous symbol of a dying order. As First Minister of France, he controls the royal finances, manipulates the young Louis XIV, and commands an intelligence network so pervasive that he knows the contents of diplomatic letters before the king's own ambassadors can deliver them. But Mazarin is also a man consumed by gout, paranoia, and an insatiable lust for wealth—a figure whose physical decay mirrors the moral bankruptcy of the regime he represents.

Lawrence Ellsworth's translation of Dumas's narrative presents Mazarin not as a cartoon villain but as a complex study in the corrupting effects of absolute power. He is cunning yet short-sighted, generous in public while hoarding in private, and ultimately lucid enough to recognize—on his deathbed—the very flaws that defined his administration. His final whispered advice to Louis XIV, never to rely on a prime minister, functions as both confession and prophecy, clearing the path for the young king's personal reign and the rise of Jean-Baptiste Colbert.

Plot Role: Architect of the Old Regime

By the spring of 1660, when the novel opens, Mazarin is already gravely ill. He suffers from severe gout that forces him to receive courtiers from his bed, his face caked with rouge that only accentuates his pallor. Yet his grip on the machinery of the French state remains absolute. He dictates revenue figures to his valet, scrutinizes every livre that passes through the treasury, and monitors the king's romantic entanglements with the calculating eye of a man who regards marriage alliances as currency.

Mazarin's role is fundamentally dual: he is the guardian of France's material wealth and the primary obstacle to the king's independence. Every major plot thread—Charles II's plea for aid, d'Artagnan's disillusionment, the secret marriage negotiations with England, the exposure of Fouquet's corruption—leads back to the cardinal's chamber. His death, when it finally arrives, is less a personal tragedy than a structural earthquake that rearranges the entire political landscape.

Motivations and Character Traits

Avarice as a Governing Principle

Mazarin's defining trait is avarice, and Dumas portrays it with almost clinical precision. In Chapter X, the cardinal tallies state revenues and finds them shy of forty million livres, still well below his private goal of forty-five million. When Louis XIV requests a single million to aid the exiled Charles II, Mazarin refuses outright, "mockingly calling the Stuarts beggars" and brandishing his ledger as proof that the Crown cannot afford charity. The scene is devastating in its implications: the First Minister of France prioritizes the accumulation of surplus over the strategic advantage of restoring a friendly monarch to the English throne.

This avarice is not merely personal greed—it is a philosophy of governance. Mazarin treats the treasury as an extension of his own estate, conflating state wealth with personal wealth so thoroughly that even his confessor cannot disentangle the two. When the Theatine friar calculates the cardinal's ecclesiastical revenues, abbey incomes, and compound interest over a decade, the sum reaches staggering proportions. The friar's conclusion—that Mazarin's "baggage is too heavy to carry across the threshold of Paradise"—exposes avarice as the sin Mazarin cannot even recognize without assistance.

Political Cunning and Control

Mazarin's intelligence network operates with chilling efficiency. When Athos arrives as ambassador of Charles II bearing a diplomatic dispatch, Mazarin already knows the letter's contents. He uses this foreknowledge to wrong-foot Athos, revealing that he remembers the Comte de La Fère as the Frondeur who once held him for ransom at Rueil. The moment is a masterclass in political theater: Mazarin demonstrates that no secret reaches the king without passing through him first.

His manipulation of Louis XIV is equally calculated. At the court card game in Chapter XXXIX, Mazarin ensures the name "Marie"—referring to Marie de Mancini, the king's exiled lover—is spoken loudly enough for Louis to hear. The young king's visible disturbance serves Mazarin's purpose: keeping Louis emotionally off-balance while the cardinal consolidates the Spanish marriage alliance that will secure France's diplomatic position.

Theatrical Hypocrisy

Perhaps Mazarin's most revealing trait is his mastery of performance. On his deathbed, he dresses, applies rouge, and receives ambassadors "like Caesar Augustus," regarding the world as a theater. When Louis XIV tears up the bequest—returning forty million livres to the cardinal's family—Mazarin unleashes a torrent of theatrical gratitude, "making that sublime jest for which the sad grumbler Boileau dared to criticize Molière." The text explicitly frames this as performance, noting that these theatrics "didn't produce quite the effect Mazarin had counted upon." Louis has already moved "to considerations of a higher order," seeing through the display.

Chronological Arc

Early Novel (Chapters X–XI): Mazarin appears in full command, refusing Charles II's requests for aid. His rejection of both the million in gold and the two hundred gentlemen demonstrates his strategic blindness: he cannot imagine a restored Stuart monarchy, and he underestimates the cost of making an enemy of a future king.

Mid-Novel (Chapters XXXIX–XLVI): The cardinal's physical decline accelerates. He hosts the court card game from his bed, his makeup failing to hide the "sallow yellow flesh of his forehead." His confrontation with Athos exposes both his spy network's reach and his residual fear of the Frondeurs who once humiliated him. The bequest scheme, engineered by Colbert, reveals a man so desperate to retain his wealth that he will gamble on the king's pride as a political strategy.

Deathbed (Chapters XLVIII–XLIX): Mazarin's final hours oscillate between agony, calculation, and unexpected lucidity. The confession scene—where the Theatine friar refuses absolution without restitution—breaks through his self-deception about his wealth. Yet even in extremis, he conspires with Colbert to hide thirteen million livres from the king. His last political act is a recommendation: Louis should employ Colbert and "never have a prime minister." The advice, sincere at last, amounts to a confession that his own model of governance was a mistake.

Key Relationships

Louis XIV: The relationship is master-servant in name but far more complex in practice. Mazarin has raised Louis from childhood, controlling his education, his marriage, and his access to power. The king's timidity before the cardinal—"still childish and timid before he who had been his master since his birth"—defines their dynamic until the moment Louis tears up the bequest, asserting his first independent act of royalty.

Anne of Austria: The queen mother is Mazarin's ally but not his puppet. She counsels the king to accept the bequest and privately resents Louis's magnanimity. Their relationship carries the weight of decades of political partnership and the hints—noted in the Historical Characters appendix—of a romantic entanglement that Dumas exploits for narrative richness.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert: Colbert is Mazarin's creation and his successor. The cardinal admires the clerk's tenacity, having been won over years earlier when Colbert insisted on the return of a compromising letter from Queen Anne. By the novel's end, Colbert has mastered Mazarin's financial secrets so completely that he can deliver thirteen million in hidden gold to the new king within hours of the cardinal's death.

Charles II: Mazarin's treatment of the exiled English king is contemptuous and short-sighted. He dismisses Charles as a beggar and refuses even the modest request for two hundred gentlemen, citing the treaty with Cromwell's England as an insurmountable obstacle. This refusal has consequences the cardinal does not live to see: a restored Charles II becomes a diplomatic adversary, and the fortification of Belle-Île—which Colbert later uses against Fouquet—draws English attention precisely because of the estrangement Mazarin helped create.

D'Artagnan: The musketeer lieutenant witnesses Mazarin's humiliation of Charles II and its aftermath. His disillusionment—"How wretched his service is!... It's time I acted for myself"—is a direct response to serving a master who serves such a minister. D'Artagnan's resignation from the musketeers, though reversed by the novel's final chapter, crystallizes the moral cost of Mazarin's regime.

Key Decisions and Consequences

1. Refusing Aid to Charles II

Mazarin's refusal to extend even a token of support to the exiled Stuart king is arguably his greatest strategic error. The text shows Louis XIV warning that a restored Charles, denied French help, "would become an enemy." Mazarin dismisses this, yet the consequences ripple through the novel's second half: Charles's restoration occurs without French assistance, Henrietta's marriage to Philippe d'Anjou becomes a diplomatic necessity rather than a gift, and France must reckon with an England that owes it nothing.

2. The Bequest Scheme

Colbert's ingenious stratagem—offering the king everything while secretly reserving thirteen million for the family—exposes Mazarin's fundamental contradiction. He wants to appear generous while retaining his wealth, to die with a clean reputation while clutching every coin. The scheme works: Louis XIV refuses the bequest, Mazarin's family keeps the fortune, and the cardinal dies believing he has outmaneuvered everyone. Yet Colbert's manipulation of the dying minister reveals the deeper truth: Mazarin's avarice made him predictable, and predictability made him a tool in the hands of his own protégé.

3. The Deathbed Confession

Mazarin's whispered advice—"never have a prime minister"—represents the novel's most concentrated moment of truth. The six words, which the text explicitly calls "a confession," acknowledge that his own concentration of power was a structural flaw in the monarchy. He follows this with the recommendation of Colbert, a man whose competence he trusts but whose loyalty to the new order will supersede any allegiance to the old.

4. Recommending Colbert

By bequeathing Colbert to Louis XIV, Mazarin ensures the continuity of financial expertise while unwittingly arming the king with the man who will dismantle the old regime's patronage networks. Colbert's first acts after Mazarin's death—revealing Fouquet's deficit, delivering the secret thirteen million, and petitioning for a Court of Justice to try corrupt financiers—are all extensions of skills he honed in the cardinal's service.

Theme and Symbol Connections

Mazarin embodies several of the novel's central themes. His obsession with accumulating wealth directly illustrates wealth as a political instrument, showing how the cardinal conflated personal fortune with state power. His physical decay and death represent the passing of an era, as the musketeers' generation of heroic individualism yields to Colbert's bureaucratic efficiency. The transfer of power from Mazarin to Louis XIV—symbolized in the king tearing up the bequest—marks the novel's decisive pivot from the old regime to the new. His refusal to aid Charles II connects to the theme of restoration and exile, while the disillusionment he provokes in d'Artagnan feeds directly into the novel's exploration of loyalty versus disillusionment.

Five Key Questions About Cardinal Mazarin

1. Why does Mazarin refuse to help Charles II?

Mazarin refuses for two reasons: avarice and strategic miscalculation. The ledger he brandishes in Chapter X shows the Crown's revenues shy of his personal target, and he treats any expenditure not directly serving French interests as waste. Politically, he cannot imagine a Stuart restoration succeeding against Cromwell's legacy and General Monck's army. The text suggests he views Charles as a lost cause unworthy of investment—a judgment the novel's subsequent events prove catastrophically wrong.

2. What is the significance of his deathbed confession?

The confession operates on multiple levels. To the Theatine friar, it exposes avarice as Mazarin's unacknowledged mortal sin. To Louis XIV, the whispered counsel—"never have a prime minister"—amounts to an admission that Mazarin's own model of governance was a structural error. The juxtaposition of these two confessions, sacred and secular, reveals a man who could not fully repent of his greed but could, in his final moments, offer the king the one piece of advice that might prevent his successor from replicating his excesses.

3. How does Colbert manipulate Mazarin in his final days?

Colbert exploits Mazarin's avarice with surgical precision. He persuades the cardinal that the proud young Louis XIV will refuse any outright gift of forty million livres, transforming a moral dilemma into a political stratagem. This allows Mazarin to draft a bequest that appears magnanimous while Colbert quietly arranges for thirteen million in secret reserves to bypass the offer entirely. Colbert's manipulation succeeds because he understands Mazarin better than Mazarin understands himself: the cardinal's need to appear generous while hoarding wealth makes him utterly predictable.

4. What does the bequest reveal about Mazarin's character?

The bequest episode reveals Mazarin as a man caught between genuine attachment to his family and an inability to relinquish control. He wants his nieces to inherit, but he also wants the king's gratitude and the public appearance of generosity. The scheme Colbert devises satisfies all these desires simultaneously, but only through deception. Mazarin's willingness to deceive the king—even on his deathbed—demonstrates that his political instincts for manipulation survived his physical decay. The theatrical gratitude he performs when Louis tears up the document shows that performance, not sincerity, remained his native language.

5. Why does Mazarin recommend Colbert to the king?

Mazarin recommends Colbert because he recognizes genuine competence, even when it has been used to manipulate him. Colbert's mastery of the cardinal's accounts, his precise knowledge of both the public forty million and the secret thirteen million, and his ability to predict Louis XIV's behavior all mark him as the ablest financial mind in France. Mazarin's recommendation is pragmatic rather than sentimental: he understands that the king will need someone who can manage the treasury and root out the corruption that flourished under the old regime. The irony is that Colbert, armed with Mazarin's secrets and methods, will become the architect of the very bureaucratic order that renders ministers like Mazarin obsolete.

For further exploration of the novel's resolution and its implications, see the ending explained and the complete questions and answers collection.