Antoine Le Maistre - Background and Early Life

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.

Le Maistre’s grandfather Arnauld, a well known lawyer, defended the University of Paris against charges laid by the Jesuits in 1594 and presented his case so forcefully that his defense has been called the original sin of the Arnaulds. He married Catherine Marion de Druy, and they had twenty children, of whom ten died young. All but one of their ten surviving children were connected with the Jansenist abbey of Port-Royal des Champs. In 1629, Arnauld's widow, Le Maistre’s grandmother, became a nun at Port-Royal de Paris, where she died in 1641. Among her children were Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), called the Great Arnauld, the leading Jansenist theologian of the 17th century in France; Jacqueline-Marie-Angélique Arnauld, known as Mère Angélique, who vecame abbess of Port-Royal des Champs, transferred the religious community to Paris and made it into a great centre of Jansenism; Jeanne-Catherine-Agnès Arnauld, known as Mère Agnès, also an abbess of Port-Royal; Henri Arnauld (1597–1692), who after a diplomatic career was ordained as a priest and went on to become bishop of Angers; and three other daughters who became nuns of Port-Royal des Champs.

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.