Antoine Le Maistre

Antoine Le Maistre (2 May 1608 – 4 November 1658) was a French lawyer, author and translator. His name has also been written as Lemaistre and Le Maître, and he sometimes used the pseudonym of Lamy.

Background and early life

Le Maistre was the son of Isaac Le Maistre, a king’s counsellor, and of Catherine Arnauld, who was the eldest daughter of the lawyer Antoine Arnauld (1560–1619) and the granddaughter of another Antoine Arnauld, seigneur de la Mothe. The Arnaulds were a family of the lesser nobility which had come to Paris from the Auvergne during the 16th century.

At the age of seven, the young Le Maistre moved with his mother and brothers into the household of his grandfather Antoine Arnauld and was brought up there. Influenced towards a career in the law, after his grandfather's death Le Maistre also considered going into the church, but he trained as a lawyer.

Career

Le Maistre quickly became a famous young advocate, with Guez de Balzac writing of him that his "powerful, rich and magnificent harangues would have aroused jealousy in Cicero and Demosthenes".

Le Maistre's withdrawal from public affairs displeased Cardinal Richelieu, who was unhappy at the loss of a talented jurist.

On 10 January 1638 Antoine and his brother Simon Le Maistre settled at Port Royal de Paris, where they were soon joined by their brothers Louis-Isaac, Jean and Charles. At the request of Saint Cyran, the brothers Le Maistre took children into their homes to teach them according to Cyranian principles.

The arrest of Saint-Cyran on 14 May 1638 put an end to this life of the solitaires as teachers. First of the Solitaires, Antoine Le Maistre settled permanently at Port Royal des Champs in August 1639, where he led a quiet and austere life. In about 1644, he was joined in his ascetic religious community by his uncle Robert Arnauld d'Andilly (1588–1674), a poet and translator whose career had been in the government's service and who became the editor of Saint-Cyran's Lettres chrétiennes et spirituelles (1645).

With his cousin Angélique de Saint-Jean, Le Maistre persuaded their aunt Angélique Arnault, abbess of Port-Royal, to write an autobiography, which was mostly the story of her community's heroic resistance in the face of its religious tribulations.

In 1656, an anti-Jansenist campaign was mounting in France, and Le Maistre went into hiding in Paris with his uncle Antoine Arnauld, then on trial for Jansenist views before the Faculty of Theology in Paris, and with the philosopher Pascal, who before that had been living at Port-Royal. Le Maistre helped Pascal to write Lettres provinciales (1656–1657), a series of letters in defence of Arnauld.

Likenesses

Portrait of Antoine "Le Maistre" (Arnauld), nephew of Antoine Arnauld. Back of copper plate has inscription "A. le Maistre, 1608-1658. Other portraits on this page are actually of Louis-Isaac Le Maistre de Sacy, his brother. Le Maistre's portrait was painted by Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674), a painter who was closely connected with Port-Royal des Champs. A copy exists, but the original is lost. The portrait was later engraved by Charles Simonneau. Champaigne also painted Le Maistre's aunts Angélique Arnauld and Catherine Agnès Arnauld and his uncle Robert Arnauld d'Andilly.