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". But at the time of the civil war called the Fronde, Le Maistre spectacularly gave up the bar and retired to Port-Royal at the instigation of Jean du Vergier de Hauranne, abbot of Saint-Cyran, placing himself under Saint-Cyran’s spiritual direction. Le Maistre was then a little less than thirty. He announced his decision in a letter to his father written after three months of reflection.
| “ | This decision has come to me from Him who is master of our will, and who changes it when he sees fit. I leave the world because he wishes me to, as you yourself would leave it, and your religion, too, if he so wished; and, without having had any particular revelations or any visions out of the ordinary, I am only the voice which calls to me out of the Gospel to repent of my sins. | ” |
Le Maistre's withdrawal from public affairs displeased Cardinal Richelieu, who was unhappy at the loss of a talented jurist.
On January 10, 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. Later the same year, Le Maistre and others, including two of his brothers, established a Jansenist ascetic group known as les solitaires (the hermits) at Port-Royal des Champs, under the spiritual direction of the abbot of Saint Cyran. 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 May 14, 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).
Le Maistre became a friend of Jean Racine and dedicated himself to translation work and to writing the lives of saints.
He claimed that France's long-standing affiliation with freedom was to do with its being a Christian nation. He wrote:
| “ | The God of the Christians is the God of liberty. By taking the form of a servant, he lifted us from servitude; he broke our chains; he made us to walk with our head held high... This kingdom is not that of France but that of Jesus Christ. | ” |
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.
Le Maistre died on November 4, 1658, after a short illness, leaving a considerable body of work.
His youngest brother was Louis-Isaac Le Maistre de Sacy (1613–84), also a follower of Saint-Cyran. He was ordained a priest in 1649, became confessor to the nuns of Port-Royal and the solitaires, and was much respected by the Jansenists.
At the time of his death, Antoine Le Maistre had begun a new translation of the New Testament. This was continued by his brother Isaac, who became its principal translator. The new work was published in 1667 as Le Nouveau Testament de Nostre Seigneur Jesus Christ: traduit en François selon l'edition Vulgate, avec les differences du Grec, and printed in Amsterdam for Gaspard Migeot, a bookseller of Mons. It thus became known as the Nouveau Testament de Mons, or the Testament of Mons.
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