Following the death of his first finance minister, La Vieuville, on 2 February 1653, Mazarin chose a new minister, Nicolas Fouquet, At the age of twenty-five, Fouquet had inherited a very large fortune after the death of his young first wife, and an even greater fortune when he married the second time, to Marie-Madeleine de Castille, whose family was one of the wealthiest in Europe. Fouquet began as a master of receipts at age twenty, then an intendant to the army, then Procuror-General for the Parliament of Paris at the age of thirty-five.