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Étienne Pasquier (7 June 1529 - 1 September 1615), French lawyer and man of letters, was born at...

Étienne Pasquier (7 June 1529 - 1 September 1615), French lawyer and man of letters, was born at Paris, on 7 June 1529 by his own account, according to others a year earlier. He was called to the Paris bar in 1549. In 1558 he became very ill through eating poisonous mushrooms, and did not recover fully for two years. This compelled him to occupy himself by literary work, and in 1560 he published the first book of his Recherches de la France. 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. Meanwhile he pursued the Recherches steadily, and published from time to time much miscellaneous work. His literary and his legal occupations coincided in a curious fashion at the Grands Jours of Poitiers in 1579. These Grands Jours (an institution which fell into desuetude at the end of the 17th century, with bad effects on the social and political welfare of the French provinces) were a kind of irregular assize in which a commission of the parlement of Paris, selected and despatched at short notice by the king, had full power to hear and determine all causes,