Arrow-maker spirit

Valentine Esprit Arrow-maker (June 10th 1632 with Pernes-the-Fountains - February 16th 1710 with Nimes) is a man of the church and preacher French, bishop of Lavaur and Nimes, considered as one of the large speakers of the 17th century.

Biography

Orphan early, it makes his studies with the college of the Christian Doctrines and becomes brother of this congregation in 1648. He discovers his vocation of preacher by speaking funeral in praise of the archbishop of Narbonne, then he leaves midday to try his fortune with Paris. He is made catechist, writing of the French and Latin poems, and becomes the tutor of Louis Urbain Lefebvre de Caumartin. He binds to the Duc of Montausier, governor of the Dolphin, which makes name it reader of its pupil. Arrow-maker then pronounces several funeral orations which make it distinguish and are worth to him to be elected member of the French Academy in 1672. The speech which he pronounces in the honor of Turenne in 1676 attracts him the good graces of the court and of Louis XIV, which grants the abbey of Saint-Severin to him and appoints it chaplain of the Dauphine one. It will be then named bishop of Lavaur, in 1685, then of Nimes, in 1687, where it will be pointed out as well for his not very common benevolence towards the Protestant as by alms as it lavishes at the time of the food shortage of 1709.

Speaker and rhetorician

It is of alive sound appreciated for its talents of speaker as much as Bourdaloue, Massillon and Bossuet. D' Alembert writes in connection with its funeral orations: “In all his speeches, the speaker, even while rising above his subjects, never appears to leave there; he can guarantee exaggeration, which, while wanting to increase the small things, the fact of still appearing smaller; he always respects the truth, so frequently and so scandalously outragée in this kind of works, and one does not see at his place the lie, which besieges the large ones during their life, coming to still crawl around their tomb to infect their ash of a cheap incense, and to celebrate their virtues in front of an audience which knew only their defects. ” About its art of public speaking, Antoine Léonard Thomas written: “Arrow-maker has much more art and the mechanism of the eloquence that it does not have the genius of it; he does not have any of these movements which announce that the speaker forgets himself, and takes part in what he tells. But its style, which is never impetuous and hot, is at least always elegant; with the defect of the force it with the correction and the grace. If it misses these original expressions and of which sometimes only one represents a mass of ideas, it has this always equal color, which gives value to the small things, and which does not strip the large ones; it almost never astonishes imagination, but it fixes it; it borrows poetry sometimes, like Bossuet, but it borrows of it more images, and Bossuet more movements. Its ideas seldom have height, but they are always right, and sometimes have this smoothness which awakes the spirit and exerts it without tiring it. ”

D' Alembert reports moreover that, when Esprit Arrow-maker was accepted with the Academy, on January 12th 1673, the same day as Racine and Welsh, “It there spoke the first, and obtained from so great applause that the author of Andromaque and Britannicus despaired to have same success. The large poet so much was intimidated and disconcerted in the presence of this public which so many times had crowned it with the theater, that it did nothing but stammer by making his speech; it was hardly heard, and it was judged it nevertheless as if it had been heard. ”

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