De Gaulle represented 'mastery over oneself, which meant mastery over history'

 To Mitterrand, de Gaulle represented 'mastery over oneself, which meant mastery over history'. After the General's death, he compared him to Henri IV, the great sixteenth-century King who ended the Wars of Religion, and Cardinal Richelieu, Chief Minister to his son Louis XIII, who laid the foundations of modern Western statecraft.

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The French stateman Mitterrand most admired was the seventeenth-century Cardinal Mazarin, preceptor and First Minister of Louis XIV, after whom he named his daughter, Mazarine.

P. Short, Mitterrand: a study in ambiguity (2013), 10 and 12

Richelieu omitted to mention those little items of the five-million-a-year income

In describing himself as a Promethean saviour, a voluntary scapegoat for the suffering of the people, Richelieu omitted to mention those little items of the five-million-a-year income, the dukedom, the absolute power, the precedence over princes of the blood, the fawnings and flatteries of all who approached him.

A. Huxley, Grey Eminence (1941), 147