—ANTOINE ARNAULD, The Art of Thinking: Port-Royal Logic The youngest of the Arnauld clan was named after his father, Antoine, and was born in 1612. His father died in 1619, when he was only seven. And so, like Blaise Pascal, he too had lost a parent in childhood. He was, by almost every account, the most intelligent member of that family, and in the end he turned out to be the most ardent defender of Jansenism. He attended the Sorbonne in the 1630s, where he became friends with Jean Guillebert, the man who ended up as the priest in Rouville and who converted the bonesetters, who in turn converted the Pascals, who in turn supported Antoine Arnauld throughout all the long years of controversy. The young Arnauld was an intellectual meteor who had earned the best grades in everything and was the talk of the faculty of theology. But he was also a great deal of trouble. The clan Arnauld shared several abiding traits: they all had wills of iron, they all possessed a deadly intelligence, and they were all born lawyers.
