PASQUIER, Étienne (1529-1615), one of the glories of the French bar, and one of not the least remarkable men of letters of the 16th century, was born at Paris on the 7th June 1529 by his own account, according to others a year earlier. Nothing is known of his family, and hardly anything of his youth, but he seems to have inherited a small property at Châtelet in the district of Brie. He certainly studied law early, and in 1547 was a pupil of the famous Cujas at Toulouse. Thence, like many of his contemporaries, he went to finish his studies in Italy. He was called to the Paris bar in November 1549, having not yet (or at most barely) reached his majority. He practised diligently and with success, but by no means neglected literature. Some of his work both at this time and later is light and almost frivolous. A treatise on love, the Mono-ρhile, appeared in 1554, and not a few similar publications followed it, one of them, the Ordonnances d'Amour, being somewhat Rabelaisian in character. Pasquier, however, though not a stoic, was a man of perfectly regular life, and he married early; his wife, who was of his own age, affluent, and, it is said, handsome, being a widow for whom he had gained a lawsuit. The next year he had the misfortune to eat some poisonous mushrooms and very nearly died of them; indeed he did not recover fully for two years. This lost him his practice for the time, and he again betook himself to general literature, publishing in 1560 the first book of his great work the Recherches de la France. Before very long, however, clients once more came to him, and in 1565, when he was thirty-seven, his fame was established by a great speech still extant, in which he pleaded the cause of the university of Paris against the Jesuits, and won it. He was ...