Antoine Le Maistre sibling Simon Le Maistre de Séricourt
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 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. 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 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).
brother or sister kin